Cesium for Omniverse v0.25.0

Cesium for Unity Samples v1.18.1

CesiumJS 1.134

User Stories

Joey Sipos, founder of 5D Realities, develops highly immersive flight experiences for virtual reality. His flagship title Glider Sim, which is available on Steam and Meta Quest, leverages Cesium for Unity and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles to bring the real world to life for users preparing for airborne adventures.

Flying a paramotor trike over the San Francisco Bay in Glider Sim. Courtesy 5D Realities.

In each simulation, users can choose from a variety of light aircraft, including hang gliders, paragliders, and ultralights. They can customize the time of day and wind conditions, adjust both airspeed and direction, and turn on visual cues to reveal wind patterns and thermal updrafts—a critical element in the art of gliding.

A paraglider ridge soaring on the Island of O’ahu, Hawaii. Wind particles with trails show wind currents in real time, with green indicating lift and red indicating sink. These optional visual cues are a valuable tool for learning gliding and how wind interacts with terrain. Courtesy 5D Realities.

In VR, players can use hand controllers to physically interact with the aircraft’s control surfaces—for example, grabbing and pulling the brake toggles in a paraglider. Some enthusiasts have taken the experience even further, building custom flight rigs for an ultra-realistic simulation.

Alek Jadkowski from Paraglide New England flight school using a simple hanging simulator rig for use with Glider Sim VR. Courtesy 5D Realities.

Originally, Joey manually built custom maps for iconic locations like the Tetons in Wyoming and Walenstadt, Switzerland, using elevation data and satellite imagery. After that labor-intensive process, he was thrilled to discover Cesium for Unity, which made it possible to bring the entire Earth into the simulator. Within just a couple of weeks, Joey integrated Cesium for Unity, allowing players to explore anywhere in the world.

Hang gliders ridge soaring cliffs near Marseille, France. In multiplayer mode, all user locations and weather conditions are synchronized across the entire globe. Players can navigate Earth, spot friends in real time, and instantly jump to their location. Courtesy 5D Realities.

Built on open standards and APIs, Cesium for Unity gives simulation designers access to an accurate, full-scale globe. With a Cesium ion account, Joey combines that geospatial foundation with Photorealistic 3D Tiles, which use the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) community standard 3D Tiles created by Cesium to efficiently stream massive amounts of 3D data.

Photorealistic 3D Tiles make Glider Sim a beautiful, accurate way to explore Earth for the casual player as well as the experienced pilot. Courtesy Joey Sipos.

GliderSim is a flight simulator with paragliders and hang gliders offering global views with Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles, developed in Cesium for Unity.

GliderSim

The app has over 5,000 users. Both new and experienced pilots can practice their technique anywhere in the world, including at real launch sites fetched from the Paragliding Earth API, allowing them to get familiar with the terrain and practice real-world scenarios such as takeoffs and landings.

Flying a hang glider in an XC (cross-country) challenge based on a real-world hang gliding competition that takes place in Mobelo, Italy. Scores are saved online and displayed in an in-game leaderboard. Courtesy 5D Realities.

Integrating Cesium has attracted a wide range of users to Glider Sim, from dedicated pilots to casual explorers. It also has allowed Joey to focus on enhancing other areas of the simulator, such as delivering a smoother multiplayer experience and introducing new features like saving and sharing favorite launch sites.

Flying an ultralight trike over the Golden Gate Bridge, California, in multiplayer mode. Courtesy 5D Realities.

With Cesium, Glider Sim is a more powerful training and practice tool, exploration platform, and global flight simulator. To bring real-world data to your simulation, check out Cesium for Unity.

Glider Sim Players Fly the World with Cesium

About 25% of the global seafloor has been mapped in high resolution, according to NOAA, leaving a lot of work to be done. It’s not always practical or safe for humans to be involved, and that’s where Terradepth comes in: its autonomous underwater vehicles collect vast amounts of 3D seabed data hosted on Cesium ion Self-Hosted and streamed to its CesiumJS-powered app, Absolute Ocean. 

Terradepth cuts the seafloor-to-browser process from weeks to days. Courtesy Terradepth.

Terradepth Absolute Ocean Platform featuring Cesium Tilers

Traditionally, sending out a crew, collecting data, manually processing it, and making it available to users took several weeks. Using machines for dangerous, repeatable work, processing and sharing data where it’s captured, and employing people for analysis cuts the seafloor-to-browser process to days. 

Terradepth has been using Cesium since Absolute Ocean’s development and release in 2022. Absolute Ocean users collect and manage their data securely so they can recognize geographic physical features, identify human-made objects like sunken wrecks or unexploded ordnance, and observe change over time beneath the waves in immersive 3D. Hydrographers in academia, infrastructure, and national security rely on this growing collection of undersea geospatial data for better, faster decisions, with nearly immediate access to interactive data instead of a static slide or hard drive transfers. 

Skellig Michael, Ireland, in Absolute Ocean. Courtesy Terradepth.

Detail in ocean data varies: 500 m resolution from satellite altimetry, 50-100 m resolution from a ship, and 5 cm resolution from a robot near the seafloor, where human safety is questionable or even impossible. Terradepth’s AUVs use multibeam sonar, magnetometers, and more to collect terabytes of data. More detail means more data, and Terradepth uses Cesium to get it to users efficiently and securely.  

With Cesium ion Self-Hosted, Terradepth stores massive point clouds, GeoTIFFs, and other data types; tiles the point clouds into 3D Tiles; and streams them to Absolute Ocean, which is built on CesiumJS, for sharing with a broad research community or smaller set of decision-makers. Cesium ion Self-Hosted enables Absolute Ocean’s processing and sharing at the edge and supports data residency requirements. In addition to its detailed seabed data, Terradepth accesses Cesium World Terrain and Bing Maps Aerial imagery for accurate geospatial context above sea level. 

“Terradepth collects terabytes of data from the ocean. The sheer size meant customers used to wait weeks or months for their data. But with Absolute Ocean using Cesium Tilers at the edge we can let them see it comparatively instantly—with an intuitive, immersive, and three-dimensional user interface,” said Andrew Lunstad, Terradepth CTO.  

Watch Andrew Lunstad's 2025 Cesium Developer Conference talk to learn more about why Terradepth deploys Cesium ion Self-Hosted.

Developers and the Open Geospatial Ecosystem

Comprehensive, collaborative seafloor data becomes insight into one of the least explored parts of our planet. 

Learn more about hosting, tiling, and streaming massive datasets in your own environment to process at the edge and meet strict security requirements.  

Terradepth Processes Seafloor Data at the Edge with Cesium ion Self-Hosted 

Large scale projects require massive coordinated efforts from many people across many businesses, whether that’s grading hundreds of acres for new suburbs, laying thousands of miles of pipelines, or hauling tens of thousands of cubic yards of dirt from quarries. Even minor errors can be costly, and sharing a common ground between the many teams involved is critical.  

Propeller supports users working at large scale sites: quarries, mines, earthworks, waste management, etc. Courtesy Propeller.

For users like these, Propeller provides the tools to perform frequent accurate drone surveys, process that data, and visualize the site. When this isn’t frequent enough, DirtMate brings near-real-time data into the mix. Propeller’s platform gives users an intuitive 3D model that’s recent, realistic, and accurate, so they can spot safety hazards, track earthworks progress, and measure reality against design plans to make calculated operational decisions around material, labor, and equipment needs. 

Propeller’s users perform drone scans of their sites and then visualize those scans in 3D with CesiumJS. Now, with support for IFC files as 3D Tiles, they’re able to compare designs against reality. Courtesy Propeller.

The heart of Propeller’s visualization is CesiumJS. Propeller was an early adopter of Cesium: for years they’ve been using Cesium’s open source software to visualize drone-captured surveys of earthworks, quarries, mines, and waste management sites. Propeller’s commitment to accuracy—reliably achieving geospatial accuracy within 3 cm—has made their platform trusted by professional surveyors. The sophisticated tooling they’ve brought into their platform, which they put into a simple form factor, makes advanced analysis accessible to anyone involved in the project, regardless of technical background.

Propeller users can see their project in accurate 3D. For pipelines, electric utilities, railways, and other long linear assets, the geospatial coordinate system in CesiumJS renders designs aligned with real-world curvature. Courtesy Propeller.

Propeller recently got an upgrade when its team incorporated Cesium’s Design Tiler into the platform. The Design Tiler takes complex BIM data, like the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) open standard, and tiles it into 3D Tiles for efficient streaming. These improvements allow users to look at much more granular data, on a much larger scale, faster than ever.

"Integrating the Cesium Design Tiler into our platform has revolutionized our support for BIM for all our customers.” 

—Harry Morris, software engineer, Propeller

3D Tiles has made IFC files from one of the most cumbersome to one of the most performant file types on Propeller’s platform. This video shows first the original solution of an IFC model loaded in Propeller’s platform and then the same model tiled as 3D Tiles. Courtesy Propeller.

A visual of IFC files loaded in Propeller's platform before 3D Tiles and after tiling.

IFC files in Propeller before and after 3D Tiles

The tiling pipeline transformed IFC files—once cumbersome and limited to 300 MB—into one of the most performant file types on Propeller’s platform, which now supports IFC files up to 2 GB. This 6–7x increase in file size capacity came with dramatic performance gains. 

“For our customers with the most demanding projects, framerates are up anywhere from 20% to 170%, and memory usage has been drastically reduced, with our most demanding models seeing a 60x reduction in memory usage and similar reductions in data transfer," said Harry Morris, Propeller software engineer.

When streamed as 3D Tiles, IFC files retain all metadata: an inspector can click on an individual bolt in a bridge and see its size, manufacturer, the contractor responsible for installing it—whatever the users have uploaded. Courtesy Propeller.

Bringing Cesium’s Design Tiler into the platform took the Propeller team less than two months to roll out to full production deployment. When they released the new feature, the team also retroactively tiled all previously uploaded IFC files, delivering immediate value to their users without requiring re-uploads or workflow changes:

"Integrating the Cesium Design Tiler into our platform has revolutionized our support for BIM for all our customers. Cesium's expertise in the 3D Tiles open standard has delivered us a solution with greatly improved performance, accuracy, and feature richness—we've delivered highly requested features and given our construction customers confidence in an easy-to-use pipeline, revolutionizing their workflows," Morris said.

For Propeller’s users, streaming IFC files as 3D Tiles means a faster, higher quality experience. They can analyze large files, like viewing cross sections of this IFC model. Courtesy Propeller.

Explore how you can use 3D Tiles to make your datasets more accessible with Cesium’s 3D tiling pipelines.  

Propeller Streaming Complex IFC Files for Construction with 3D Tiles 

"The most brilliant engineering designs, no matter how well crafted, remain unrealized until their vision can be clearly communicated and understood by all stakeholders," said Wayne Sullivan, visualization lead at infrastructure engineering and consulting firm Parametrix. This philosophy drives Parametrix’s Advanced Visualization team: a group of software engineers and 3D artists using Cesium for Unreal, Cesium ion, and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles to enhance public outreach and help win project bids by making complex designs easier to understand.

High-fidelity, photorealistic renderings of a proposed design helped the City of Las Vegas secure a $25 million grant for the Stewart Avenue Complete Streets project. Courtesy Parametrix.

Founded in Sumner, Washington, in 1969, Parametrix has expanded its services and geographic footprint across the United States. Today, the company provides multidisciplinary services in transportation, water resources, environmental planning, and community building, consistently ranking among top design firms in the regions they serve. In 2020, Parametrix acquired Civil FX, a startup that Sullivan helped build, specializing in interactive visualizations of transportation projects. 

Sullivan's Advanced Visualization team has become an integral part of Parametrix. The team's work supports projects across the company, dedicating 75% of their time to visualizing designs for community engagement and 25% to supporting grant and RFP proposals to win new business. Their workflow involves directly importing 3D models, created in applications such as Civil 3D, MicroStation, OpenBridge Modeler, or Revit, into Unreal Engine. The team uses Cesium for Unreal to precisely place these 3D models onto a WGS84 globe. With Cesium ion, they stream Photorealistic 3D Tiles into Unreal Engine to provide rich geospatial context and boost project realism, so stakeholders get a clear picture of changes coming to the communities they care about.

Built on open standards and APIs, Cesium for Unreal combines the 3D geospatial capability of Cesium with the high-fidelity rendering power of Unreal Engine, making smooth rendering and simulation available across industries. Photorealistic 3D Tiles are built on 3D Tiles, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) community standard created by Cesium, to efficiently stream massive amounts of 3D data.  

Sullivan and his team began using Cesium in 2023 after learning about it on Reddit and LinkedIn. Today, Sullivan estimates that Cesium for Unreal and Photorealistic 3D Tiles cut about 30% of their team’s project time. “We use that extra time to build better experiences,” said Sullivan. 

Parametrix played a crucial role in helping the City of Las Vegas secure a $25 million federal grant to transform a 4.5-mile section of Stewart Avenue. This corridor is a vital route, with more than 35% of all users being pedestrians and cyclists. The City of Las Vegas identified that fragmented sidewalks and a critical lack of shade contribute to an unsafe and uninviting environment for pedestrians and other roadway users, as detailed in their Stewart Avenue Complete Streets Project Fact Sheet. 

“This is such an important project to the city and to the community in general,” Nicole Melton, the city engineering project manager, told KLAS news. “And when we do these public works projects that revitalize areas, we can spur economic development.” 

VR headsets were used to immerse the public in proposed designs during outreach efforts for the Stewart Avenue Complete Streets project. Courtesy Parametrix.

"Our visualization work was instrumental in communicating the project's vision to help secure its funding, and now we are excited to be involved with its implementation," explained Sullivan. The project is currently in its early design and planning phases, with construction anticipated to begin in 2027. Parametrix continues to leverage Cesium for Unreal and Photorealistic 3D Tiles in their work to gather public feedback. At a recent public meeting, Parametrix streamed the project concept to VR headsets, so attendees could immerse themselves in the proposed design.  

Parametrix’s visualization team extended Cesium’s open-source platform to showcase various aesthetic treatments for the Keystone Bridge project in Reno, Nevada. Courtesy Parametrix.

Parametrix: Keystone Bridge Material Switcher

Parametrix also used Cesium for Unreal and Photorealistic 3D Tiles on the Keystone Bridge project in Reno, Nevada, for the Regional Transportation Commission of Washoe. The project required showcasing aesthetic treatments for the bridge. Instead of creating static images to show treatment options, Parametrix developed a dynamic tool on top of Cesium for Unreal, leveraging its open-source foundation. This tool enables instant swapping of different colors of concrete as well as girder and rail colors and types, allowing project stakeholders to examine numerous aesthetic combinations. This interactive approach improves the efficiency of the stakeholder decision-making process, with the detailed model integrating with Photorealistic 3D Tiles for real-world context. 

“In the past, we’d have to render so many different aesthetic combinations on a project like this,” Sullivan said. “This tool saves us a lot of rendering time.” 

Parametrix’s Advanced Visualization team is committed to pushing the boundaries of project visualization. Their sights are set on leveraging Cesium ion for Gaussian splats production, a feature introduced at the 2025 Cesium Developer Conference. “Post-processing and cleaning up traditional photogrammetry can be time consuming,” explained 3D designer Justin Gould. “I’m looking forward to experimenting with Gaussian splats in Cesium to speed that up and using that data to inform custom geometries,” added Gould. 

Get started with a free Cesium ion account to pair your 3D models with accurate geospatial context. 

Parametrix Engages Communities and Wins Bids with Cesium

Editor's note: Cesium is committed to open source, open standards, and rapid innovation. We power training, planning, operations, and analysis across the US Department of Defense and Intelligence Community. We're proud to have collaborated with NUWC Division Newport and NSWC Carderock Division on this article about the impact of OTAs. Read the PDF here.

In March 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued the memo “Directing Modern Software Acquisition to Maximize Lethality,” mandating the use of the Software Acquisition Pathway for all Department of Defense (DOD) software development procurements. This memo also instructs DOD components to prioritize Other Transaction Authority agreements (OTAs) and Commercial Solutions Openings (CSOs) as the preferred methods for acquiring software capabilities. 

OTAs were created in 1958 to give DOD flexibility to incorporate business practices that reflect commercial industry standards and best practices into how it awards contracts. DOD historically employed OTAs in conducting research and development; in 2016, the National Defense Authorization Act expanded the use of OTAs to include prototype and production. This expansion provided the warfare centers with another alternative to a Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR)-based procurement contract. 

NAVSEA’s warfare centers have been doing business this way for years. 

In 2016, the Undersea Technology Innovation Consortium (UTIC) was stood up as a non-profit research organization comprised of small and large technology companies, academia, and nonprofits who are developing undersea technologies and addressing defense and security challenges.  

By 2018, UTIC, represented by management firm Advanced Technology International, and NUWC Newport Division signed a three-year OTA contract (renewable for up to 10 years) to explore Undersea Technology Innovation in a broad range of undersea and maritime prototyping activities. NUWC Newport Division’s contracting professionals began exploring how to use OTA to deliver prototypes to the submarine Fleet faster and soon released its first Call for Topics under the OTA—the first warfare center to pursue this option.

Their success led to collaboration with other warfare centers including the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) Carderock Division via Dave Sracic, Distinguished Software Engineer for Fleet Signatures Systems.  

Sracic needed a solution that would let him approve software development without micromanaging it. In 2019, Sracic awarded two agreements utilizing NUWC Newport Division’s UTIC OTA, one of which went to Analytical Graphics Inc., whose subcontractor was Cesium.  

Cesium specializes in 3D geospatial technology, particularly for visualization and analysis. The company is considered a “non-traditional” government partner, which was a major aspect of the success of the collaboration. 

As part of the OTA prototype agreement, Cesium provided a platform for building 3D geospatial applications, including CesiumJS, an open-source library for 3D visualization in web browsers designed for robust interoperability and scaling for massive datasets. Cesium works to advance the geospatial ecosystem and open source, open standards, data sharing, and interoperability.  

In May 2024, NSWC Carderock awarded $2.2 million to Cesium through the OTA.  

Stills from Cesium’s bathymetry data set.

“UTIC had already proven to be effective for my team and our small initial toe-in-the-water approach had been highly successful. Given the choice between working with NUWC Newport to put together a new Request for Prototyping versus pursuing a traditional FAR-based path, it wasn’t much of a choice at all—I’ll take six weeks over 18 months any day,” said Sracic. 

Trent Tinker, director of Cesium’s federal business development, said, “From Cesium’s perspective, the OTA streamlined administrative processes and allowed for a direct line of communication with Navy customers. The OTA got us a step closer to the end users, and ensuring their data supports better, faster decisions is something that we’re really excited about.” 

According to Sracic, “Open source software is a building block of nearly every DOD system, and at some level, virtually all of the world’s most complex software systems. Our key challenge in building Navy combat systems is in using open-source software without finding ourselves trapped when it evolves faster than we do. Our thought was we’re using this open source CesiumJS and it does 80 percent of what we want, so let’s pay the experts who built it to make it do more.” 

As Sracic explained, “We got those changes back into CesiumJS, upstream, open source version, which means we do not have to keep a Navy fork of that software. The open source community maintains those specific changes. We care deeply about those features and use them heavily. Now that they’re part of the master branch, with test cases, we have reasonable confidence they won’t die, and we don’t pay some kind of sustainment fee. This is what the DOD policy aspires to—the government contributing back to open source.” 

“The OTA also enables Cesium to work with warfare centers on the open source position of their challenges,” said Tinker. “While some of the development stays with the government, other roadmap-aligned services go to the open source baseline and benefit everyone.” 

“Public-private partnerships between the Navy and UTIC members enable the Navy to create new paths to acquire and improve technological capabilities aboard its fleet, focusing on critical missions rather than the building blocks of visualization. Dave Sracic was proactive and flexible, and our terms were Firm Fixed Price, pairing our risk tolerance and desire to do meaningful work as a technology growth company,” said Patrick Cozzi, Cesium founder and Bentley Systems chief platform officer. 

“This is quantifiable value and return on investment, and sufficient to justify follow-on efforts to integrate capability into a combat system, which is a win for Navy in that it’s already risk-reduced and well understood,” explained Sracic. “And it’s a win for industry, which can do that work through non-competitive follow-on to the OTA.”

When it comes to infrastructure investments, visualization transforms public engagement from abstract discussions to concrete decision-making. HNTB’s Immersive Media Solutions team uses Cesium ion, Cesium for Unreal, Cesium for Unity, and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles to help community stakeholders better understand proposed infrastructure projects and engage meaningfully in the approval process. 

A flythrough of a proposed design to replace the Bourne Bridge was used in public outreach efforts as part of the Cape Cod Bridges Program. Courtesy HNTB. 

HNTB: Bourne Bridge

Founded in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1914, HNTB initially focused on designing railroad bridges. Today, the company offers comprehensive services in engineering, architecture, planning, and construction management, primarily focusing on transportation infrastructure. Their architectural services extend to designing and managing projects for public assembly facilities, including numerous prominent sports stadiums and arenas.  

“When presenting an infrastructure project proposal for public engagement, it’s crucial that local stakeholders and property owners understand where their property, building, or favorite park is located in relation to the proposal, and that the surrounding context is recognizable,” HNTB immersive media solutions manager Dave Willard said. 

Willard and his team create real-time interactive media to visualize and assess infrastructure project designs, from single highway interchanges to 30-mile road and rail corridors. They load a diverse range of 3D engineering and design models of roads, bridges, or rail networks—created in applications like OpenRoads, Revit, MicroStation, Civil3D, or SketchUp—directly into Unreal Engine or Unity. The team uses the Cesium for Unreal or Cesium for Unity plugins, depending on the project, and accesses Photorealistic 3D Tiles via Cesium ion to add real-world context, enriching project visualizations for public review and community engagement initiatives.  

Designed to deliver highly detailed and realistic data for immersive environments, Google Maps Platform's Photorealistic 3D Tiles enable immersive experiences that scale from individual buildings to entire cities. Photorealistic 3D Tiles leverage the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) community standard 3D Tiles format, created by Cesium, which performantly streams massive amounts of 3D geospatial data. 

Prior to adopting Cesium, providing accurate geospatial context for major projects was a significant time investment, requiring the team to manually model, texture, and detail existing buildings.   

“Now, we bring that data in from Cesium and use it as-is in many cases,” Willard explained. “It removes the headache on our end, allowing us to focus our time on visualizing the proposed project instead of the buildings that are already there.”   

HNTB's visualization team extended Cesium's open-source platform to vertically align long linear infrastructure models with the Earth's curvature. Courtesy HNTB.

This capability proved invaluable to HNTB during its work on a long highway corridor project in the southeastern United States. 

“Manually modeling existing buildings for contextual detail on long linear projects historically required over 1,000 hours of work,” Willard said. “Cesium reduces that time to between 200 and 300 hours." 

The extensibility and open-source foundation of Cesium enabled HNTB's visualization team to build a tool that addressed the challenge they faced in accurately aligning this 26-mile corridor model. Traditional engineering designs don't account for the Earth's curvature, leading to noticeable vertical discrepancies over long distances—in this case, the model floated about 80 feet above the earth at one end and dipped 80 below the other. 

HNTB developed a non-destructive mesh blending tool on top of Cesium that could automatically apply the necessary curvature to large, complex 3D models. This allowed them to continuously update design models in their Unity environment, with the tool automatically correcting for Earth's curvature, ensuring "ground truth accuracy" for their clients.  

“One of the really cool things about having Cesium is the ability to build other tools on top of it,” remarked Adam Liss, HNTB senior immersive media specialist. 

Willard's team, serving as a key consultant for the Massachusetts Department of Transportation on the Cape Cod Bridges Program, was tasked with presenting 10 different interchange configurations for public review. 

Traditionally, this would have necessitated creating numerous individual videos and renderings for each combination, making it difficult for the public to compare scenarios and provide feedback. Instead, Willard's team applied their Cesium-powered interactive media capabilities, so presenters were able to dynamically display and toggle between these different interchange options, with detailed surroundings the reviewers expected to see, in real time via pixel streams and locally-run applications during public meetings. 

HNTB’s team also built masking tools using Cesium. These tools enable them to overlay potential designs directly onto existing structures, making it easy for viewers to compare the past with the proposed future.

For a bridge proposal to link barrier islands along the Gulf Coast of Texas, HNTB integrated Cesium’s World Bathymetry data into their visualization. This addition helped stakeholders understand how underwater topography and the locations of historic shipwrecks impacted the busy shipping lanes beneath the proposed bridge design. “It’s important to be able to render this 2D-type information in a 3D context,” Liss explained. 

This streamlined process, powered by Cesium, enables quick visualization of design alternatives and facilitates efficient collection of public input to identify preferred designs for their projects. 

Innovation defines HNTB's 111-year legacy in infrastructure, a commitment clearly seen in their Immersive Media Solutions team's work to transform public engagement by making the abstract concrete. When it comes to Cesium, the team feels like they are just scratching the surface. “As we transition away from manual modeling of existing context, technologies like Cesium will continue to make our workflows much faster,” Willard said. 

Looking into the future, Willard’s sights are set on digital twin delivery, bridging the work between owner-operators and engineering firms.  

“The end goal isn't just about interactive real-time visualizations; it's transforming those visualizations into informational environments—digital twins,” Willard said. “Imagine delivering a complete football stadium or road corridor, complete with all its element-level metadata as a digital twin. That, to me, is a truly valuable deliverable for an engineering firm.” 

Bring accurate real-world context, like Photorealistic 3D Tiles, to your infrastructure projects with Cesium ion. 

HNTB Streamlines Infrastructure Project Visualization with Cesium 

都市開発や社会インフラ整備において、関係者間の認識のズレは大きな課題でした。特に、専門知識のない行政担当者や住民にとって、設計意図を正確に理解することは容易ではありません。その背景には、膨大なデータをどのように統合し、可視化し、合意形成を円滑に進めるかという長年の問題がありました。特に、リアルな背景データの作成は、従来膨大な時間とコストを要する作業でした。しかし、日本工営株式会社はこの課題を解決するためにCesium for Unrealを導入し、設計対象エリアに対する正確な地理空間背景データの取得・処理を大幅に効率化。その結果、関係者や意思決定者、住民がインフラ設計やシミュレーションをより容易に理解できるようになりました。

都市開発やインフラ計画において、設計対象エリアのみならず、周辺環境の再現が不可欠です。背景データがなければ、設計の影響を適切に評価できず、関係者間の共通認識が形成されにくくなります。しかし、正確な地理空間の背景データの作成は従来、非常に手間のかかる作業であり、他にも多くの課題がありました。

背景データ作成の負担：都市全体や広範囲の地形データを個別に作成する必要があり、多大な時間と労力を要していた。

データ統合の壁：DEMデータ、航空・衛星画像、点群データ、SfMメッシュ、BIM/CIMデータなど、多種多様なデータを手作業で統合する作業が必要だった。

リアルタイムレンダリングの限界：高精細な3Dモデルの処理が困難で、スムーズなシミュレーションが実現できなかった。

こうした課題を克服するため、日本工営はCesium ionとCesium for Unrealを活用し、背景データの作成コストを劇的に削減しました。

Cesium ionとCesium for Unrealによる背景データの革新

高品質な3D地理空間データを活用した、効率的な背景データ生成

以前は、設計対象エリア外の背景モデルを作成するために、手作業で航空測量データや点群データを取得し、3Dモデリングソフトウェアで調整する必要がありました。しかし、Cesium ionを利用することで、このプロセスが一変しました。Cesium Globeの3Dコンテンツやパートナーのデータから地形・建物・画像情報にアクセスすることで、ゼロからデータセットを構築する必要をなくしたのです。

Unreal Fest 2024 Tokyo 講演資料より抜粋　提供：日本工営株式会社

Cesium World Bathymetry を活用し、海底地形データをそのまま取り込むことで、港湾・沿岸開発の背景作成が簡単に。

Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles を適用することで、高精度な都市環境を手作業なしで背景データとして取得。

Bing Mapsの航空写真 + Cesium World Terrain を活用し、広範囲の地形情報を即座に統合。

Japan 3D Buildings は、国土交通省PLATEAUが提供する全国200を超える市区町村において、クリック一つでこれまで整備されたすべての建物データが利用可能。

Cesium ionのContent Data（衛星画像、3D建築データ、地形情報など）を利用することで、ゼロからデータを作成する手間を省き、高品質な背景データを短時間で取得可能。

これにより、日本工営では、背景データ作成にかかっていた膨大な工数を削減し、設計エリアのモデリングに集中できるようになりました。

Cesium ion導入による作業工数削減効果 - Unreal Fest 2024 Tokyo 講演資料より抜粋。提供：日本工営株式会社

Cesium ionを通じたUnreal Engineとのシームレスな統合

Cesium ionとCesium for Unreal pluginを活用することで、膨大な地理空間データをクラウドから直接ストリーミングし、Unreal Engine内でダイナミックに可視化が可能になりました。

3Dタイルの自動処理：Cesium ionのタイリングパイプラインを活用し、BIM/CIMデータを自動的に3Dタイル化。

リアルタイムストリーミング：Google Photorealistic 3D TilesやCesium World Terrain、測量で取得した地形のデータを動的に読み込み、必要に応じて表示。

データの軽量化とパフォーマンス向上：Cesium ion上で処理されたデータをCesium for Unrealを使用しUnreal Engineに取り込み、最適化された形でレンダリング。

住民説明会では、Cesium World TerrainやCesium ionに搭載されているPLATEA 3D都市モデルを活用し、設計対象箇所に密接に関連する都市の背景データを即座に表示。住民が自分の街の未来像を直感的に理解でき、説明の効率が向上しました。従来の住民説明会では、パースや平面配置図を使用しており、参加者が自ら頭の中で3次元空間を想像していましたが、この手法により、空間に対する正確な共通認識を得た状態で議論を行うことができました。

水辺空間開発プロジェクトでの活用例　提供：日本工営株式会社

水辺空間開発プロジェクトでの活用例　提供：日本工営株式会社

Using Cesium in waterfront development projects. Courtesy Nippon Koei Co., Ltd.

Nippon Koei waterfront development projects

Bing画像 + Cesium World Terrainを利用し、川の周辺環境を詳細に再現。流況シミュレーションデータと組み合わせることで、河川の状態や氾濫リスクの可視化が飛躍的に向上しました。河川の流れの様子や都市の氾濫シミュレーションをCesiumの各種データと重ね合わせることで、場所に対する理解、リスクの理解が大幅に向上します。流況シミュレーションをゲームエンジンで表現する取り組みは進めていましたが、場所の理解につながる周辺環境の際現には時間がかかっていました。これがCesium ionとCesium for Unrealを用いることで大幅に効率化できるようになりました。

河川管理プロジェクトの成果例　出典：日本工営株式会社

Using Cesium for river management project outcomes. Courtesy Nippon Koei Co., Ltd.

Nippon Koei river management project

Cesium World Bathymetryを活用し、震源データを海底地形と統合。日本工営は、これにより、震源位置や震源域の変化、海底地形との関係性など防災や地球科学の観点で有用な可視化を実現しました。非常に多くの地震が日本全国で発生していることを立体的に見ることは、防災教育の観点でも重要な資料として利用できると考えられます。

2020年～2022年3月までの震源位置を３Ｄデータの動画で見せたもの（提供：日本工営株式会社）

2020年～2022年3月までの震源位置を３Ｄデータの動画で見せたもの（提供：日本工営株式会社）

3D visualization content of the earthquake epicenter. Courtesy Nippon Koei Co., Ltd.

Nippon Koei earthquake epicenter

上の動画のコンテンツを制作した日本工営の佐藤隆洋氏は、以下のように語ります。「日本ではプレート沿いや断層沿いに発生する地震が多く、震源位置を3次元で表現した見せ方でも、関連性が浮かび上がってきます。そこで2020年～2022年3月までの震源位置を３Ｄデータの動画で見れるように作成したのが上の動画コンテンツです。

一方で、プレート活動により発生する地震とプレート活動で形成された海底地形の関係性の理解まではできません。そこで、Cesium ionとCesium for Unreal、およびCesium ionのworld Bathymetryを使用して、震源の位置と海底地形の関係や、地震の発生状況を時系列で表現する取り組みを行いました。それが、2024年8月に日向灘で起きた地震を可視化した次のコンテンツになります。この地震では南海トラフ地震臨時情報（巨大地震注意）が発表されています。このコンテンツでは、地震の発生場所はどこか、発生場所は移動しているのかなど、海底地形と同時に表示することで現象の理解を深めることができたと考えています。」

（2024年8月8日の日向灘の地震：8月8日に日向灘を震源とするM7.1,最大震度6弱の地震が発生。このコンテンツは、その地震をUnrealEngineとCesium ionを活用して可視化し、震源の位置と海底地形の関係や、地震の発生状況を時系列で表現したもの。Cesium World Bathymetryを利用。 動画提供：日本工営株式会社、 2024年8月6日～17日の震源データ出典：気象庁震源リスト）

地震の震源データ可視化プロジェクトの成果例　提供：日本工営株式会社

2020年～2022年3月までの震源位置を３Ｄデータの動画で見せたもの（提供：日本工営株式会社）

A 3D visualization powered by Cesium, illustrating the August 8, 2024 Hyūga-nada earthquake’s epicenter, seabed topography, and seismic timeline. Courtesy Nippon Koei Co., Ltd.

Nippon Koei earthquake

土砂災害は、大雨や地震などにより発生し大きな被害を生じさせます。どういったメカニズムで土砂災害が発生しているのかの理解は、対策を考えるうえでも重要になります。そしてここでも、土砂災害が発生している場所と周辺の関係性の理解が重要になります。Cesium for UnrealとCesium ionに登録した詳細な地形データやCesium World Terrainを活用し、高精度な地形データを取得。土砂崩れの3次元シミュレーションと合成することで、どういった現象がどこで発生したのかの理解が容易になっています。

土砂災害シミュレーション可視化の成果例　提供：日本工営株式会社

土砂災害シミュレーション可視化の成果例　提供：日本工営株式会社

Visualization results from landslide disaster simulation. Courtesy Nippon Koei Co., Ltd.

Nippon Koei landslide simulation

Cesium ionの活用により、日本工営は以下の大きなメリットを得ました。

各種データの重ね合わせの効率化：Cesium ionを利用することで詳細な測量データや各種モデルの地理的座標合わせの効率化が図られました。

背景モデル作成の時間削減：従来の手作業による背景作成が不要になり、設計業務に注力できるようになりました。

プロジェクトのスピード向上：背景作成がゼロになったことで、設計や解析により集中できるようになりました。

合意形成の迅速化：高精度な背景データを即座に表示できるため、関係者全員が直感的に理解できるようになりました。

日本工営は、Cesium for Unreal、Cesium ionの活用をさらに拡大し、スマートシティやデジタルツインの導入を推進。今後は、ゲーミフィケーションの要素を取り入れ、市民参加型の都市計画やインフラ管理を実現していく予定です。

高品質な3D地理空間データで変わる未来のインフラ設計

Cesium ionとCesium for Unrealの活用により、日本工営は、インフラ設計の大幅な効率化と高精度な可視化とシミュレーションを実現しました都市開発や社会インフラ整備の分野において、より正確でリアルな3D空間を提供し、リソースを最適に活用するために、ぜひCesium ionアカウントに登録してください。

Nippon Koei Transforms Infrastructure with Cesium for Unreal

In urban development and social infrastructure projects, discrepancies in understanding among stakeholders have long been a significant challenge. For government officials and residents without specialized knowledge, accurately grasping the intent behind a design is not always straightforward. At the heart of this challenge lies the need to effectively integrate vast amounts of data, visualize it clearly, and facilitate smooth consensus-building.

Particularly, creating realistic background data has traditionally been a labor-intensive and costly process. To address this, Nippon Koei began using Cesium ion and Cesium for Unreal, significantly streamlining the acquisition and processing of accurate geospatial context for a design area. As a result, collaborating stakeholders, decision-makers, and residents are more easily able to comprehend infrastructure designs and simulations.

Recreating not only the design area but also its surrounding environment is crucial in urban development and infrastructure planning. Without accurate background data, it becomes difficult to properly assess the impact of a design, making it harder for stakeholders to establish a common understanding. Creating this accurate geospatial context has traditionally been a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, accompanied by several key challenges:

The burden of background data creation: Large-scale terrain and city models had to be manually created, requiring extensive time and effort.

Challenges in data integration: Combining multiple data formats—such as DEM, aerial and satellite imagery, point cloud data, SfM meshes, and BIM/CIM data—often required manual adjustments.

Limitations in real-time rendering: Processing high-resolution 3D models was computationally demanding, making smooth simulation and real-time visualization difficult.

To overcome these challenges, Nippon Koei adopted Cesium ion and Cesium for Unreal, significantly reducing the cost and time required for background data creation.

Revolutionizing background data with Cesium ion and Cesium for Unreal

Leveraging curated 3D content for seamless background data generation

Previously, creating models for areas surrounding the core design zone required manually acquiring aerial survey data, processing point cloud data, and refining models using 3D modeling software. Nippon Koei uses Cesium ion to access terrain, buildings, and imagery from Cesium Globe 3D Content and partner data, eliminating the need to build datasets from scratch.

Datasets available via Cesium ion. Excerpt from presentation materials at Unreal Fest 2024 Tokyo. (Courtesy of Nippon Koei Co., Ltd.)

Cesium World Bathymetry enables direct integration of seabed terrain data, simplifying background creation for port and coastal development projects.

Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles provide detailed urban environments, eliminating the need for manual modeling of background data.

Bing Maps Aerial imagery + Cesium World Terrain allows for instant integration of large-scale terrain information.

Japan 3D Buildings allows users to access building data with one click from over 200 municipalities nationwide from PLATEAU (provided by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism).


With Cesium ion, Nippon Koei has drastically reduced the labor previously required for surrounding geospatial data creation, allowing engineers to focus on modeling the actual design area.

Impact of Cesium ion on reducing workload. What used to take 20-40 hours now takes just 1 with Cesium. Excerpt from presentation materials at Unreal Fest 2024 Tokyo. (Courtesy of Nippon Koei Co., Ltd.)

With Cesium ion and the Cesium for Unreal plugin, vast amounts of geospatial data can be streamed directly from the cloud, enabling dynamic visualization in Unreal Engine with high efficiency.

Automated 3D tiling: The Cesium ion tiling pipeline allows BIM/CIM data to be converted into 3D Tiles without manual intervention.

Real-time streaming: Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles, Cesium World Terrain, and survey-based terrain datasets can be dynamically loaded and displayed as needed.

Optimized performance: Cesium ion processes data efficiently, allowing seamless integration and rendering of optimized data within Unreal Engine.

During a public consultation meeting, Cesium World Terrain and PLATEAU 3D city models available on Cesium ion were used to instantly visualize urban background data closely related to the design area. Residents were able to intuitively grasp the future vision of their city, significantly improving communication and efficiency in the presentation.

Previously, such meetings relied on static perspective drawings and site plans, requiring attendees to mentally reconstruct 3D spaces. However, with this new approach, discussions took place with a shared and accurate spatial understanding, eliminating interpretation gaps and improving decision-making processes.

Using Cesium in waterfront development projects. Courtesy Nippon Koei Co., Ltd.

Nippon Koei used Bing Maps Aerial imagery and Cesium World Terrain and have achieved a highly detailed reproduction of the river’s surrounding environment. When combined with flow simulation data, the visualization of river conditions and flood risks has improved dramatically. Overlaying river flow patterns and urban flood simulations with various Cesium datasets significantly enhances spatial understanding and risk awareness. While they had been working on visualizing flow simulations using game engines, reproducing the surrounding environment to support spatial understanding used to be time-consuming. This process has now been greatly streamlined through the use of Cesium ion and Cesium for Unreal.

3D visualization content of the earthquake epicenter. Courtesy Nippon Koei Co., Ltd.

This video content visualizes the hypocenter locations of earthquakes that occurred between 2020 and March 2022 using 3D data. In Japan, many earthquakes occur along tectonic plate boundaries and fault lines, and by presenting the hypocenters in three dimensions, these correlations become more apparent. However, this method alone does not provide a clear understanding of the relationship between earthquakes caused by plate activity and the seafloor topography shaped by that same activity.

To address this, Nippon Koei used Cesium for Unreal, Cesium ion, and Cesium World Bathymetry to visualize the relationship between hypocenter locations and seafloor features, as well as to show the progression of seismic activity over time. This led to the creation of new content visualizing the earthquake that occurred off the coast of Hyuga-nada in August 2024. In this case, an Emergency Nankai Trough Earthquake Information (warning of a potential megathrust earthquake) was issued.

By displaying the location and movement of the earthquake in conjunction with the seafloor topography, this content helped deepen understanding of the phenomena.

A 3D visualization powered by Cesium, illustrating the August 8, 2024 Hyūga-nada earthquake’s epicenter, seabed topography, and seismic timeline. Courtesy Nippon Koei Co., Ltd.

Glider Sim Players Fly the World with Cesium

Terradepth Processes Seafloor Data at the Edge with Cesium ion Self-Hosted

Propeller Streaming Complex IFC Files for Construction with 3D Tiles

Parametrix Engages Communities and Wins Bids with Cesium

Warfighting, Software, and the OTA

HNTB Streamlines Infrastructure Project Visualization with Cesium

日本工営 - Cesium for Unrealで描くインフラ革命