Cesium for Omniverse v0.30.0

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Federal & Defense

What does a Moon landing look like? The student-run Space Technologies Laboratory (STL) at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University is using Cesium Moon and Cesium for Unreal to test the camera system on EagleCam 2.0 before it flies on the IM-3 mission—and takes the first lunar selfie. 

STL used Cesium to build a digital twin of the camera system and large-scale lunar terrain to test settings and learn when to apply adjustments during the mission. Courtesy Embry-Riddle Space Technologies Laboratory.

The student-run Space Technologies Laboratory (STL) at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University is using Cesium Moon and Cesium for Unreal to test the camera system on EagleCam 2.0 before it flies on the IM-3 mission—and takes the first lunar selfie.

Embry-Riddle STL EagleCam 2.0

IM-3 is part of the NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, expected to fly before the end of 2026, and EagleCam 2.0’s job is gathering information-rich images for examination post flight. Instead of building a physical prototype of Intuitive Machines’ lunar lander to assess mounting configurations, spending limited lab budget on the wrong lenses, and imaging ground that doesn’t match that of Earth’s natural satellite, STL used Cesium to build a digital twin of the camera system and large-scale lunar terrain to test settings and learn when to apply adjustments during the mission. 

STL develops hardware for commercial missions and research partners and has 15-20 students, undergrads through PhD candidates, actively working on the 10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm EagleCam. Two to three of those students work on the digital twin. EagleCam is fully student designed, built, and operated. 

This is the second time a university has sent a payload to the Moon; the first was EagleCam 1.0. 

Work on EagleCam 2.0 began in 2025. The challenges STL saw on EagleCam 1.0—such as predicting lunar lighting, camera placement, fisheye behavior, and coverage—pushed the team to build a digital twin to inform EagleCam 2.0’s life cycle. 

EagleCam is fully student designed, built, and operated. Courtesy Embry-Riddle Space Technologies Laboratory.

To see the Moon before IM-3 lands (or even lifts off), STL uses Cesium Moon and Cesium for Unreal. STL streams Cesium Moon—a single complete 3D Tileset composed of precise terrain and imagery from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) program and other sources—via Cesium ion SaaS to the EagleCam digital twin in Unreal Engine. Individual students have their own ion accounts, so they can fuse assets relevant to their parts of the mission, like high-res geoTIFFs of the landing site. 

Because Cesium Moon is 3D Tiles, details load based on the active camera instead of forcing the lab to manage one enormous Moon mesh, improving development and navigation. 

On top of Cesium Moon, STL added the flight camera's sensor and lens properties, camera position and orientation, realistic exposure controls, roughly 100,000-lux sunlight, and time-based Sun–Earth–Moon geometry from NASA SPICE through the MaxQ Spaceflight Toolkit in Unreal Engine. Unreal produces six render targets per lens, combines them into a fisheye image, and can export image sets for calibration or NASA Ames Stereo Pipeline processing. The team also added orbit trajectories to test maneuvers and observe field of view (FOV) during them. 

Building out the digital twin took five to six months, but now Sam Nikolov and his labmates can add lens specs and get renderings in minutes. Cesium Moon provides the mission-relevant geospatial context as an accurate 3D base layer, STL’s camera model generates synthetic stereo images, and the NASA Ames Stereo Pipeline reconstructs terrain from those images, all in Unreal Engine. (STL also uses Cesium for Unity for quick lens-shader prototyping.) Instead of a made-up lens paired with a random spot on the Moon to show what shots might look like, STL gets accurate predictions that support decisions on which lenses and what settings will achieve usable imagery. A 240,000-mile trip is not a simple service call; validating the hardware before launch is vital. 

Nikolov, who is dedicated to software development, including firmware on satellite, image processing, and digital twins at STL, explained: “Without Cesium, we would have had to find, process, package, georeference, stream, and render high-resolution lunar terrain ourselves. That would have taken a huge amount of effort and added risk before we even reached the camera problem we actually cared about. Cesium gave our two- to three-person subgroup the terrain, coordinate, LOD, and streaming backbone so we could focus on the lens, calibration, lighting, and operations use case. Cesium ion has never let us down.” 

The challenges STL saw on EagleCam 1.0 pushed the team to build a digital twin to inform EagleCam 2.0’s life cycle. Courtesy Embry-Riddle Space Technologies Laboratory.

Nikolov reports that the biggest success is that the simulated images look extremely close to the lab’s real camera references under matched settings. The lab selects a date and time, photographs the Moon outside, considers atmospheric conditions, and compares the result with the simulated view—both visually convincing and correct. 

As IM-3 flies to the Moon, STL can consult the digital twin to check expected camera settings and FOV and assess if the returned data will be sufficient for analysis. This means the digital twin supports EagleCam throughout its life cycle: design, hardware selection and placement, mission rehearsal, operations, and post-flight analysis. 

Watch Sam Nikolov’s 2026 Cesium Developer Conference lightning talk to learn about the role Cesium plays in EagleCam 2.0. 

Seeing the Moon before we get there: Game-engine digital twin for lunar imaging - Samuil Nikolov

With Cesium, STL’s EagleCam digital twin enables reduced risk, faster iteration, better design confidence, stronger research output, and a better foundation for future partnerships. It’s also an immersive, intuitive version of the students’ hard work on distortion curves and drawings.  

To add Cesium Moon to your Cesium for Unreal projects, follow this guide. 

Embry-Riddle Uses Cesium Moon to Test EagleCam 2.0 Camera System

In March 2026, Iran struck Prince Sultan Air Base near Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, wounding US servicemembers and damaging aircraft. CNN journalists hypothesized that Russian satellites supported Iran’s intelligence before the attack. To evaluate this possibility, reporters worked with Kayhan Space, a spaceflight safety, operations, and intelligence company. Kayhan used its flagship product Satcat, whose geospatial and orbital visualization is built on CesiumJS, to verify satellite capabilities and behavior. 

Kayhan Space uses CesiumJS in Satcat. The team, with Satcat AI Analyst, examined Russian satellite capabilities and behavior, assisting CNN in reporting that Iranian attacks on Prince Sultan Air Base in March 2026 may have been supported by Russian intelligence. Courtesy Kayhan Space.

Kayhan Space Satcat: Russian Satellites Orbiting Earth in March 2026

Colorado-based Kayhan Space was founded in 2019 as a spaceflight safety company. One of its first flagship products, Pathfinder, was launched in 2022, with orbital visualization built on Cesium. As Kayhan expanded to deliver satellite operations capabilities and analytics, Pathfinder’s capabilities were integrated into Satcat in 2024 alongside new intelligence tools and public-facing features, making parts of the platform available to the public for the first time. Satcat's spaceflight safety capabilities provide operator coordination, risk assessment reports for close approaches, and recommendations for mitigating risk, aligning with operators’ workflows.  

Despite its vastness, space is a busy place, and information can be noisy: Are numbers calculated correctly? Does the data adhere to standards? What is this spacecraft’s history? Is it behaving normally? Is its owner friendly or an adversary? And, of course, what do you want to do about it? 

Some of Kayhan Space’s users are Capella Space, AST SpaceMobile, NOAA, and now CNN.  

COSMOS 2573 is a Russian EO satellite. This simulation shows satellite paths and visibility cones. Courtesy Kayhan Space.

Kayhan Space Satcat: Russian Satellites and Viz Cones

Hyun Seo, Chief Product Officer at Kayhan Space, employed an AI-assisted analysis tool within Satcat to begin examining capabilities and behavior of the entire Russian satellite fleet. “What Russian satellites had the best visibility over Prince Sultan Air Base in March?” he prompted the AI. 

Working with the CNN team, Seo dug in to fact-check the results and use Satcat to build accurate 3D simulations, based on time of day, weather, orbit, and satellite function. Inactive satellites as well as navigation and communications satellites, for example, moved off the list, but electro-optical (EO), synthetic aperture radar (SAR), radio frequency (RF), and infrared (IR) were in play. 

Seo recorded the simulations directly from the app, moving from analysis to broadcast-ready visualization, and used only public data so that CNN journalists could repeat his steps—verifying in 3D with their own tooling and sources, vital for accurate reporting. Seo also created primers on EO, SAR, RF, and IR for the CNN broadcast, including the Cesium globe for geospatial context and visual consistency but with larger-than-life models of the satellites for illustration for a broad audience. 

Seo created primers on EO, SAR, RF, and IR for CNN’s broadcast. Courtesy Kayhan Space.

Kayhan Space Satcat: SAR Primer

Satcat gets public data on spacecraft and debris ownership, launch, position, weather, mission, and more from Space-Track, Celestrak, NOAA, the European Space Agency, and other providers. Position data comes as TLEs with SGP4 propagation, and users can add proprietary data for their own constellations. Privileged access gives users the SP Catalog from the US Space Force with synthetic covariance as well as owner/operator ephemerides. Instead of separate spreadsheets, Satcat fuses data streams with a 3D globe in CesiumJS for accurate, immersive visualization and analysis in a browser.  

“We get value from the tech, Sandcastles and reference material, and community. Even with AI coding tools, it’s just not worth using something else. We use Cesium because we’re not just concerned with the visualization but with the maths,” said Seo. 

The 3D models of satellites Seo shared with CNN are glTF/glb. The models were not streamed with the simulation; CNN added the models to the recording for the broadcast. The underlying data and orbit paths remained grounded in Kayhan Space’s analysis, so reporters used real space data as evidence of Russian intelligence support ahead of Iranian missile attacks on Prince Sultan Air Base. 

3D model of a Bars-M EO satellite for Russian military intelligence, like Cosmos 2573. Courtesy Kayhan Space.

Kayhan Space Satcat: Bars-M Satellite Model

With accurate data visualized and analyzed in Kayhan Space’s CesiumJS-powered Satcat, journalists were able to verify information and create a visual story viewers could understand. You can watch the full CNN Investigates clip here. 

Detail and accuracy are foundations of the Cesium platform. Learn to build your own time-dynamic visualization and simulation app for space with CesiumJS. 

Kayhan Space Investigates Satellite Intelligence for CNN with CesiumJS 

Space missions are complex to plan, execute, and communicate to audiences with varying knowledge and interests. To retain engineering accuracy while bringing charts and strings of numbers to life, Blacknight Space’s Event Horizon uses CesiumJS for mission plans and milestones. 

Views in Event Horizon seamlessly transition from Earth centric to Moon centric—and beyond—to meet the needs of complex storytelling. Courtesy Blacknight Space.

Space missions are complex to plan, execute, and communicate to audiences with varying knowledge and interests. To retain engineering accuracy while bringing charts and strings of numbers to life, Blacknight Space’s Event Horizon uses CesiumJS for mission plans and milestones.

Blacknight Space Event Horizon

Event Horizon is an interactive, browser-based 3D mission visualization platform, designed for space operators, engineers, and technical marketers to deliver a dynamic showcase of mission plans and milestones. Teams can confirm trajectories, review events, and educate stakeholders and the public.  The application was recently released as an early beta version.

Blacknight Space supports commercial aerospace companies and US defense organizations, aiming to make the industry dramatically more efficient through digital engineering solutions. Blacknight is an Ansys partner for Digital Mission Engineering and shares AGI heritage with Cesium, championing tools for simulations in challenging environments. 

“Cesium technology is part of our DNA,” said Nate McBee, VP of product and engineering at Blacknight Space.

An Event Horizon overview highlights the Artemis II mission. Courtesy Blacknight Space. 

Blacknight has been developing Event Horizon on CesiumJS since day one, enabling users across the globe to explore live orbital telemetry, verified flight trajectories, and mission milestones in a browser. (Organizations with sensitive information can employ an on-prem version of Event Horizon.) Users have access to curated data from trusted public satellite databases and can bring their own data—trajectory, attitude, and error ellipsoids, among others. 

Event Horizon connects to Cesium ion to provide Cesium World Terrain plus satellite imagery; Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles; and Cesium Moon when mission views bring the user close to Earth or our moon, to ensure efficient streaming of these massive datasets over the web. Users can connect their own ion accounts, too. The app provides models of spacecraft, such as the International Space Station and satellites, and those are rendered as glTF/.glb.  

Views seamlessly transition from Earth centric to Moon centric—and beyond—to meet the needs of complex storytelling. Planners and communicators authoring mission narratives with Event Horizon can add saved views and notes to indicate plans and milestones, like stage separations, payload deployments, or rendezvous, in immersive 4D. Blacknight works closely with partners, such as Cesium and COMSPOC, on physics, ephemeris, and rendering, ensuring accurate representation. 

Event Horizon's web interface provides an interactive 3D representation of space operations, mission milestones, and analytics. Courtesy Blacknight Space. 

“Our end users and customers always comment on how nice the visualizations look, and, in the space industry, accurate visualization is a critical aspect of mission planning and situational awareness. Cesium helps us paint that accurate picture,” McBee said. 

With Cesium’s roots in aerospace and defense, CesiumJS brings out-of-the-box capability to Event Horizon, but its openness and extensibility mean Blacknight can mold it further, implementing unique visualizations and data streams. Blacknight has another advantage, though: two of the organization’s aerospace engineers are Cesium Certified Developers, and McBee estimates they can do in 25% of their time what would require someone else’s full-time efforts. The team gets to their aerospace expertise quickly, while Cesium handles the geospatial context and rendering. 

“Being part of a company that's growing the Cesium ecosystem, after helping others share what they can do, shows how the Cesium community drives real progress,” said Kyle Heisey, director of operations at Blacknight Space. Heisey launched and managed the CCD program when he was a Cesium employee. 

Watch Klaus Konarkowski’s 2026 Cesium Developer Conference breakout session to learn about the role Cesium plays in Event Horizon.

Aerospace visualization with telemetry streaming, propagation and mission events - Klaus Konarkowski

As Blacknight continues its work on Event Horizon, the team is planning support for unique coordinate systems, relative orbit frames, and mobile performance.  

Bring real-world understanding to complicated narratives with CesiumJS and a Cesium ion account. 

Blacknight Space’s Event Horizon Showcases Mission Plans and Milestones with CesiumJS

For the Port of Corpus Christi, Texas, USA, managing security operations is a monumental task. The Port encompasses nearly 125 square miles, across both land and water, and directly owns close to 35,000 acres. This enormous footprint is spread over two counties with hundreds of facilities, vehicles, and vessels active at any time, and the Port relies on dozens of disparate digital systems for everything from vessel tracking to security. 

“Go into just about any first responder dispatch center, what do you see, screens upon screens to display more and more windows. We knew we needed to create a comprehensive view of Port activities.” 

- Darrell Keach, Business Systems Manager and the Port’s lead for OPTICS

With funding from a Department of Homeland Security grant to enhance critical infrastructure security, the Port brought on The Acceleration Agency (TAA) to build OPTICS, a 3D operational active digital twin that merges many of these systems into a single pane of glass and spatially organizes the data for true comprehensive situational awareness. TAA created both a desktop and mobile app for the Port that integrated live vessel traffic and computer aid dispatch with a geospatial model built using ArcGIS Maps SDK, giving port operators a realistic, real-time view of their environment.

This deployment served its purpose for internal teams; however, the Port is also looking to share this new fused dataset with security partners such as the United States Coast Guard. Deploying the app to external users during a crisis would be cumbersome: granting and revoking access to the secure application, which contains sensitive law enforcement data subject to FBI Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) requirements, created an administrative bottleneck. The port needed a solution that could be rapidly deployed to authorized external users on any device without requiring an installation, and that could also easily rescind access when needed.

Active Digital Twin of the Port of Corpus Christi built by The Acceleration Agencywith ProjectGemini’s SaaS leveraging CesiumJS. Courtesy The Acceleration Agency.

ProjectGemini Cesium Web 7-23-2026

The solution was CesiumJS. TAA developed Project Gemini, their Active Digital Twin platform and framework, which uses CesiumJS for geospatial visualization. The Port’s Active Digital Twin with CesiumJS is designed to give supervisors and dispatchers a better way to view various security-related operations in one single view, wherever they may be located. “Creating a mobile and web version allows us to put much of this data in the hands of officers in the field,” Keach said.

Active Digital Twin of the Port of Corpus Christi built with ProjectGemini’s SaaS leveraging CesiumJS. Users can locate and view live security camera feeds through the intuitive geospatial interface. Courtesy The Acceleration Agency.

After years of investment in OPTICS, creating an entirely new, web-based 3D Active Digital Twin could have been daunting. But because CesiumJS embraces an open ecosystem and the ability to consume ArcGIS content out of the box, the team was able to directly ingest the Port’s existing ArcGIS Enterprise data. Rather than rebuilding the data pipeline from scratch, TAA used CesiumJS to bridge their existing geospatial data with what could be an easily shareable web environment.

The CesiumJS version of the digital twin provides all the same models and real-time updates as the Unity application. Courtesy The Acceleration Agency.

The Port of Corpus Christi digital twin app version created in Unity3D. The desktop version has a photorealistic look while the web version prioritizes performance. Courtesy The Acceleration Agency.

The flexibility of open standards and community-driven development allowed TAA to develop a highly accessible web-based Active Digital Twin. When it’s complete, the Port of Corpus Christi will be able to use the CesiumJS Active Digital Twin to grant secure, temporary access to a real-time operational view during an emergency, empowering rapid, cross-agency collaboration in critical moments.

Detailed information about facilities, together with live information such as lists of vessels currently on site, makes the digital twin an essential tool in understanding the evolving nature of events on site. Courtesy The Acceleration Agency.

To get started with CesiumJS, experiment in Cesium Sandcastle, which has code examples and an AI-driven chat panel for support.

The Acceleration Agency Leverages CesiumJS to Expand Port of Corpus Christi Active Digital Twin

The GEOINT Symposium is one of my favorite events of the year, and I'm thrilled that Cesium is sponsoring and participating again this year! We're excited to reconnect with the community and dive into the latest geospatial innovations that are advancing national security. 
 
We’ll be at booth 1303 at the Gaylord Rockies in Aurora, Colorado, May 3-6, showcasing the latest from Cesium. Stop by to talk with the team and see how our platform leverages open standards to deliver secure, mission-ready deployments, advanced reality modeling and analysis, and cutting-edge AI integrations. We’ll demonstrate how LLMs and agentic AI can transform the way you interact with your data, enabling natural conversational access to your 3D environments.  

Visit Cesium in booth 1303 at GEOINT Symposium 2026.

Interoperability: The days of siloed systems have faded. Mission success increasingly depends on technologies integrating across environments, domains, and partners.  

Mission-ready 3D geospatial data: We see growing demand for high-fidelity 3D geospatial that serves operations, not just visualization, to “train on the data you operate on.” This ensures simulations, AI models, and mission planning all leverage foundational data to reflect reality. High-res insets captured at the tactical edge are integrated for actionable intelligence. 

LLMs + Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers: As LLMs and agentic AI integrate into mission workflows, 3D Tiles provides a structured, streamable way for these systems to access real-world context. Paired with MCP-style architectures, this enables agents to take action. They can interact with live 3D environments and surface insights in real time.  

Gaussian splats and reality modeling: Beyond traditional meshes, Gaussian splatting allows representation of complex "un-meshable" scenes with incredible photorealism and efficiency. 3D Tiles 2.0 and the upcoming extensions provide the foundation for these massive, high-fidelity reality models to be scalable, interoperable, and analysis ready. 

3D Tiles as the foundation: We will demonstrate government use cases for 3D Tiles 1.1 and highlight new capabilities coming in 3D Tiles 2.0, positioning the open 3D geospatial ecosystem for the next decade. 

Bentley Systems integration: Since joining Bentley, we have doubled down on openness and interoperability, accelerating Cesium’s mission. See how our integration with iTwin bridges the gap between AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction) and GEOINT, providing a subsurface-to-space view of the world. 

iTwin Capture-powered reality modeling and analysis: We're turning raw 2D imagery into high-fidelity 3D reality meshes, point clouds, and Gaussian splats for advanced feature extraction and analysis. 

Cesium AI integrations: By connecting the Cesium ecosystem with the MCP, we enable LLMs and agentic AI to reason about the real world. This includes MCP servers for camera control, entity management, and geolocation, allowing AI assistants to not only query 3D data but also interact with and navigate live CesiumJS scenes. 

Our Moon Lander Game: Back by popular demand and after the successful Artemis II mission to the Moon, we’ll have our Moon Lander Game built with Cesium Moon and Cesium for Unreal. You can also see how CesiumJS was used to track the flight of Artemis II.  (Go, Artemis!) 

Cesium ecosystem in action: We’ll have daily demos from our partners, including Ansys, Blacknight Space, and XRF. 

I’m also excited to present a lightning talk on 3D Tiles 2.0 at 1:10 p.m. on Tuesday in Innovation Corner, outside Exhibit Hall 3, and look forward to your input on the standard. 3D Tiles 2.0 is currently going through the community standard process at OGC.

And, of course, join a great crew from across the geospatial community at the Cesium Reception on Tuesday night at Mountain Pass Sports Bar, upper level, from 9 p.m. to midnight. 

The future of geospatial is being built on open standards, interoperability, and AI-driven insights. We can't wait to explore these trends with you and shape the next decade of geospatial innovation together. 

Connect with us at BOOTH 1303 and feel free to schedule a meeting with our team to discuss your specific needs. We look forward to seeing you at GEOINT! 

Editor's note: updated demo partners on April 28, 2026.

In complex, high-pressure environments, how information is presented can be as important as the information itself. XReality Factory (XRF) uses CesiumJS and Cesium for Unity for a single shared operational view for better, faster decisions across real operations and training scenarios, throughout defense, security, and emergency management.

XRF's tools consolidate data sources and connect agencies via a single shared operational view with 3D geospatial context for better decisions. Courtesy XRF.

XReality Factory

The volcanic eruptions on the Spanish island of La Palma in 2021 were the tipping point for XRF’s founding team, with expertise in extended reality and interactive technologies, to build tools to consolidate data sources and connect agencies via a single shared operational view with 3D geospatial context for better decisions.

“What we were developing in gaming is useful in emergencies, useful to our heroes,” said Raul Espada, XRF’s CRO.

XRF supports users in critical infrastructure, defense, emergency management, and security, working with the Spanish Armed Forces, Royal Netherlands Armed Forces, public authorities, and industry. In NATO exercises with armed forces from multiple nations on different systems, XRF tools served as the common operating picture (COP), enabling coordination across distributed teams, improving situational awareness, and accelerating decision-making with meaningful information, instead of a barrage of siloed data. The company is part of NATO’s EU Defence Innovation Scheme (EUDIS) and Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) programs.

In NATO exercises, XRF tools served as the COP, enabling coordination across distributed teams. Courtesy XRF.

At the core of XRF’s dual-use command and control (C2) system is Compass, a platform for fusing data from several sources into a trusted 3D COP. With Cesium World Terrain or Cesium World Bathymetry via Cesium ion as Compass’s base, users add their own 3D models, drone imagery, and other information layers specific to their missions and organizational requirements for rapid, efficient delivery, streaming as 3D Tiles into CesiumJS for the web and Cesium for Unity for XR.

Around Compass, XRF developed complementary tools:

Apolo, a mobile app for units deployed on the ground, built with CesiumJS;

Colossus, a large multitouch command table for fixed control rooms, using CesiumJS;

Sandbox, an XR multiuser command center for planning, training, and operations, built on Cesium for Unity and device agnostic across Microsoft HoloLens, Meta Quest, and Apple Vision Pro; and

Hermes, XRF’s AI system that interprets scenarios to support decisions with natural language.

With real-world data available on a variety of devices, users can more quickly understand terrain, elevation, line of sight, and spatial relationships in context.

“Our goal has always been to integrate the solution the final user needs in their unifying system, so most of our effort goes into interoperability,” said Antonio Sanchez, XRF’s primary developer.

3D Tiles, an OGC community standard built on glTF and other 3D data types, enables XRF’s users to efficiently stream massive datasets, at any scale, together. The view their users need is the one that will load with the most detail, supporting immersive visualization and analysis on both high-end workstations and bandwidth-constrained devices.

XRF uses Cesium ion SaaS for testing, demos, and situations with reliable internet. The team and its users employ Cesium ion Self-Hosted for strict internal security requirements and off-grid environments.

“The level of performance—rendering continental-scale terrain down to tactical detail, with multiple users connected—is essential for user trust. In defense and emergency contexts, if the visualization stutters or lags, the system is not usable. The feedback we’ve received confirms that the 3D view is responsive and dependable,” Sanchez said.

XRF’s users report clearer briefings, faster alignment across teams, more confident decisions, and smoother transitions because of the connected, integrated approach, with the 3D geospatial foundation as a key enabler.

The volcanic eruptions on the Spanish island of La Palma in 2021 were the tipping point for XRF’s founding team. Pictured here is La Palma in XRF's Apolo, a mobile app for units deployed on the ground, built with CesiumJS. Courtesy XRF.

The volcanic eruptions on the Spanish island of La Palma in 2021 were the tipping point for XRF’s founding team. Pictured here is La Palma in XRF's Colossus, a large multitouch command table for fixed control rooms, using CesiumJS. Courtesy XRF.

XRF estimates that using Cesium reduced its time to first operational deployments by 30-40%. Because the team does not need to build or maintain the core 3D terrain or streaming architecture, they are able to focus on additional features—and lower their ongoing costs by replacing disconnected tools with one shared system, just as they’re doing for their users in defense, security, and emergency management.

Learn more about optimizing, hosting, and streaming your data in an immersive, shared source of truth for time-sensitive action.

Hear from XRF at the 2026 Cesium Developer Conference. Register to join us in Philadelphia in June.

XRF Connects and Integrates Missions with Cesium

The Netherlands, perhaps more than any other country, appreciates how critical what lies below the surface is to what's built above. Much of the country sits below sea level, meaning groundwater is high, and centuries of silt and sand deposits from continental rivers mean the soil is soft. Consequently, understanding the makeup of the ground is of paramount importance for city planning.

Bedrock.engineer visualizes large geospatial subsurface datasets using 3D Tiles voxels. Here they use 3D Tiles voxels to visualize GeoTOP, a public geological model of the Netherlands by the Dutch Geological Survey. Courtesy Bedrock.engineer.

Visualizing national scale subsurface data with 3D Tiles voxels

GeoTOP demo by Bedrock.engineer

Unfortunately, subsurface data is challenging to share: the science is highly technical, and visualizations are often limited to PDFs, hand‑drawn cross sections, or specialized desktop software. That’s why Bedrock.engineer was founded. Bedrock.engineer works to make geotechnical data—boreholes, CPT tests, ground models, and analysis results—more accessible and easier to integrate into the tools engineers and stakeholders use. One of their interests is 3D visualization of subsurface models in the browser. Using the 3D Tiles 2.0 draft voxels extension in CesiumJS, they are streaming large subsurface datasets, demonstrating how open-format 3D Tiles enables geological voxel models to be explored in spatial context directly in the browser. Open source software and open data formats are central to how Bedrock.engineer works.

Bedrock.engineer visualizes subsurface data, like these boreholes in Hong Kong, together with above ground data in CesiumJS. Courtesy Bedrock.engineer.

Subsurface visualization with 3D Tiles voxels

Voxel representations, which can model continuous volumes and store material properties such as soil type, are ideal for subsurface datasets that hold continuous data like sediment layers. But visualizing very large voxel datasets in a geospatial context was not possible with open standards before 3D Tiles support.

Bedrock.engineer visualizes GeoTOP’s 50m deep subsurface data covering the entire Netherlands in CesiumJS using voxels. Courtesy Bedrock.engineer.

With the addition of voxel support in the draft 3D Tiles 2.0 specification, Bedrock.engineer can now combine voxel‑based subsurface models with 3D Tiles’ hierarchical streaming. Voxel renderings are currently a 3D Tiles extension and are part of the 3D Tiles 2.0 proposal, which was described at the 134th OGC Member Meeting in March. Bedrock.engineer has built their own Python tooling to convert gridded scientific formats, such as NetCDF, into 3D Tiles. 3D Tiles makes it possible to visualize dense, volumetric datasets covering an entire nation directly in the browser.

Bedrock.engineer brings GeoTOP data into CesiumJS using the 3D Tiles open standard, as in this dataset from Amsterdam. Courtesy Bedrock.engineer.

3D Tiles voxels make visualizing geoscience models possible, and bringing those 3D Tiles into CesiumJS makes it usable. What Bedrock.engineer appreciates most about CesiumJS is that visualizations are widely accessible to anyone with the link, allowing technical and nontechnical stakeholders to interact with the data directly.

"What 3D Tiles voxels change is accessibility. Subsurface models that used to require specialist desktop software can now be explored directly in the browser, in true 3D, in spatial context with the world above ground. And because it’s an open format, there’s no lock-in: anyone can build on it and combine it with their own data. That considerably lowers the barrier." 

– Jules Blom, Cofounder Bedrock.engineer

By bringing subsurface data into CesiumJS, Bedrock.engineer is also able to combine that data with other datasets, including terrain and buildings, for a more complete picture. For city planning, seeing what is below ground is only valuable if it’s shown in context with the natural and built environment above. Building on CesiumJS, Bedrock.engineer has implemented multivariable filtering, allowing users to see just the relevant data for any given application.

Fence diagrams make it easier to see layers of subsurface sediment. Courtesy Bedrock.engineer.

A prime example of Bedrock.engineer’s work is their CesiumJS visualization of GeoTOP, a public geological model of the Netherlands by the Dutch Geological Survey. By bringing GeoTOP into CesiumJS as 3D Tiles, Bedrock.engineer can embed the model in any browser-based application, combine it with other datasets in spatial context, and build custom tools on top of it, all using an open standard.

Every square meter of land in the Netherlands is designated for a particular use, such as agricultural, urban development, or green space. Municipalities are legally obliged to consider subsurface data whenever it is relevant to a public task. Courtesy Bedrock.engineer.

The GeoTOP model is well suited for governments seeking to better understand the geological features of their area at a regional scale. In the Netherlands, government bodies are legally required to consult BRO subsurface data, including models like GeoTOP, whenever it is relevant to a public task. Bedrock.engineer’s visualization makes it easier to understand and communicate what that data actually shows. When a local government can clearly see what’s below ground, they can make better decisions around spatial planning, groundwater management, land subsidence, and dike safety assessments.

Such visualization can also be useful to building developers in the early stages of a project. Knowing whether they’ll be dealing with peat or sand makes a significant difference when considering foundation type. Though GeoTOP is not a substitute for a full geotechnical investigation, but it gives a useful first indication before that work begins.

Semi-transparent voxel rendering of geophysical models reveals subsurface structures, creating an X-ray–like view of the underground. Data courtesy Emerald Geomodelling, image courtesy Bedrock.engineer.

Bedrock.engineer is working to add GeoTOP data to the LEIA viewer, a CesiumJS-based digital twin for the provincial government of Zeeland, Netherlands. Bringing GeoTOP into LEIA will allow policy makers to see subsurface data in spatial context with other government datasets. Bedrock.engineer has also brought a shallow subsurface model of the Antwerp urban region and harbor into CesiumJS, visualized as 3D Tiles voxels.

Voxel support is part of the draft 3D Tiles 2.0 specification, a key aspect of our commitment to open standards. If you’re working with volumetric data, explore the 3D Tiles OGC Community Standard, try it in CesiumJS, and share your feedback on GitHub. We’d love to see your implementation.

Bedrock.engineer Streams Subsurface Data at Nation Scale with 3D Tiles Voxels

Over the last 20 years, technology and the nature of conflict have changed more rapidly than US defense policies and military procedures. To modernize and synchronize operational-level planning, Sandtable uses CesiumJS, Cesium for Unity, and Cesium ion to combine traditional military planning documents and immersive geospatial context.

For operational wargaming in the COA analysis step of the MDMP, as well as mission rehearsal, Sandtable Navigator provides a 4D environment built with Cesium for Unity. Pictured here are friendly and enemy units at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, USA. Courtesy Sandtable.

For operational wargaming in the COA analysis step of the MDMP, as well as mission rehearsal, Sandtable Navigator provides a 4D environment built with Cesium for Unity. Pictured here are friendly and enemy units at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. Courtesy Sandtable.

Sandtable: COA Analysis

Founded in 2024 by US Army veterans and researchers, Sandtable pairs AI with human judgment in its Mentat and Navigator prototypes to facilitate mission analysis, course-of-action (COA) development, and operational wargaming with more data, detail, and speed.

Planning, collaboration, and rehearsal tools tend to involve 2D imagery, spreadsheets, printed documents, a physical sand table, and the risks that come with putting a group of key people in the same place simultaneously. The company’s push to bring time-dynamic 3D to military planning results in interactive environments that fuse data types and sources to support planning and assessment for both human teams and autonomous systems, no matter where they are. 

During COA DEV, planners using Sandtable Mentat create, visualize, and share unit symbology, operational graphics, viewshed, and ranges of weapon systems in 4D. Courtesy Sandtable. 

“What we’re simulating and planning—like drones, counterdrone technology, and electromagnetic warfare—exists in 3D space in reality, and we need to be able to represent reality. That requires Cesium,” said Sandtable COO Brady Moore. 

And reality is complex: data comes from myriad sources, and conditions shift over time. With AI, the platform helps surface patterns, compare options, and stress-test assumptions, so commanders can focus their judgment where it matters most.

Planners drag and drop MIL STD 2525D symbols from predefined combat power data to build enemy SITEMPs and friendly COAs in Mentat. Courtesy Sandtable.

Planners drag and drop MIL STD 2525D symbols from predefined combat power data to build enemy SITEMPs and friendly courses of action in Mentat. Courtesy Sandtable.

Sandtable: Enemy SITEMPs and Friends COAs

Cesium is deployed across Sandtable’s solution to accelerate key phases of the military decision-making process (MDMP), particularly mission analysis, COA development, and rehearsal, with authoritative geospatial context and efficient data delivery:

Mentat, built with CesiumJS, incorporates written orders, concept sketches, and open datasets, e.g., for soil density and composition, on top of real-world terrain in a browser for rapidly adjusting COAs with AI.

Navigator uses Cesium for Unity for COA analysis and mission rehearsal in a shared virtual environment, wherever participants are, on a variety of devices. Instead of merely rehearsing plans produced in Mentat, Navigator feeds insights back into the planning environment—enabling continuous refinement rather than one-time execution.

Sandtable Mentat allows planners to determine which factors about the terrain are relevant to operations and visualize them together or separately. Courtesy Sandtable. 

With detailed geospatial data from Cesium ion and a range of public and government sources (for example, NOAA and USDA datasets), warfighters and autonomous vehicles know not only where hills and trees are but also microterrain features relevant to mobility and line of sight. This is important because factors like height of vegetation determine what a drone can—or can’t—see (depending on available data resolution and source quality). This data is primarily 3D Tiles, quantized mesh, and KML/KMZ, optimized, hosted, and streamed via Cesium ion for efficiency and interoperability. Cesium ion also enables Sandtable to be data agnostic, because 3D Tiles is an OGC community standard, and can use the Army's own Well Formed Format data when available. Sandtable uses Cesium ion SaaS while connected to the internet and anticipates leveraging Cesium ion Self-Hosted in future disconnected or denied environments, as well as secure enclaves.

Sandtable Mentat develops its own Modified Combined Obstacle Overlay (MCOO) using CesiumJS to visualize layers. Sandtable’s detailed datasets help determine terrain trafficability. Other terrain data includes canopy height, land use, soil attributes, slope, and elevation. Courtesy Sandtable.

Sandtable Mentat develops its own Modified Combined Obstacle Overlay (MCOO) using CesiumJS to visualize layers. Sandtable’s detailed datasets help determine terrain trafficability. Other terrain data include canopy height, land use, soil attributes, slope, and elevation. Courtesy Sandtable.

Sandtable: Modified Combined Obstacle Overlay (MCOO)

Critical to Sandtable’s work is embedding with the very people who will use the platform. During the Army’s xTechOverwatch competition in October 2025, the team tested Mentat on a tablet in the field with soldiers during the day and adjusted the capabilities and interface each night, returning the next day with an improved product. Sandtable developers were able to take feedback from concept to functional visualization and analysis in hours rather than days. This speed of development is enabled by adaptable, streaming-ready 3D Tiles and open-source runtimes. (The company’s CEO, Brian Hamilton, is a Cesium Certified Developer, and Sandtable was among the competition’s winners.)  

Watch Sandtable CTO Brent Lance’s 2025 Cesium Developer Conference talk to learn about the role Cesium plays across Sandtable’s solution for the MDMP. 

Military Planning Using Agentic AI and Simulations

Mentat and Navigator have been deemed Awardable on the Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace, making them eligible for government procurement and tightening collaboration between government and industry.

Use Cesium ion to securely fuse high-resolution imagery and terrain with unit-specific data for actionable information and collaboration. Get started with a community account.  

Author’s note: Sandtable’s COO, Brady Moore, is a former Cesium employee. 

Sandtable Modernizes and Synchronizes Military Planning with Cesium

To modernize defense planning and rehearsal, VRAI used Cesium for Unreal to build the Virtual All-Domain Environment (VADE), enabling users to deeply examine areas of interest before arriving. 

VADE uses Cesium to mirror operational reality. Courtesy VRAI. 

Virtual All-Domain Environment (VADE) uses Cesium to mirror operational reality. Courtesy VRAI.

This Is VADE

An immersive XR platform in the works since 2021, VADE began as a proof of concept between simulation data company VRAI and the Royal Air Force for comprehensive situational awareness and could scale across Defence. VRAI announced VADE’s full release at DSEI in fall 2025. 

Real-world 3D data and live collaboration in VADE enable a common operating picture (COP) for detailed planning and faster decisions. Add XR, and troops familiarize themselves with a location before deploying. VADE can be set for individuals or in multiplayer mode, accessed via desktop app or with headsets.  

The tool’s capabilities span domains: 

For drone intervisibility studies, users can draw routes, mark waypoints at each kilometer, and determine blind spots at specific locations and heights to ensure proper placement anywhere on the globe.  

With a volumetric tool for battlespace management and deconfliction, airspace coordination via VADE is accurate and intuitive.  

High-altitude parachute insertion simulations include trackback lines for descent, giving the distance to the drop zone throughout the line; users can view the line from the aircraft or the ground, with the surroundings they can expect to see.  

Because VADE allows users to customize for NATO standards, slopes turn red if they’re not sufficient for helicopter landing sites (HLS). 

Although VADE is not a targeting tool, users can examine the impacts of explosives. 

Restricted operating zone for UAS overwatch. Courtesy VRAI.

Intervisibility study to ensure proper placement. Courtesy VRAI.

Route planning, with directional arrows and optional kilometer markers. Courtesy VRAI.

Gun target line (GTL) tool. Courtesy VRAI.

GTL and impact of explosives. Courtesy VRAI.

VADE employs Cesium World Terrain and Bing Maps Aerial imagery with Cesium for Unreal to enable users to navigate to places that matter for their missions, manipulating the time of day and simulating weather conditions, with high-fidelity rendering. When users are online, they can pull in Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles for exercises in urban areas, and Vexcel data is a boon when VADE is used as part of an airgapped solution via Cesium ion Self-Hosted.  

The VADE library includes data via Cesium ion; 3D models of aircraft, tanks, and other vehicles; NATO map marking symbols for friendly forces and enemy capabilities; and user-specific sources, like their own imagery, photogrammetry, or GitHub repos. VADE connects to users’ private Cesium ion accounts for hosting, tiling, and streaming efficiently. Using geospecific data via Cesium saves VRAI engineers and their users days of work per location and obviates the need for hand modeling or geotypical data, improving situational awareness and decision speed and reducing the cognitive burden on those tasked with complex planning and rehearsal. 

“It’s a transformative way of planning for defense. We operate in multiple dimensions—why wouldn’t we plan in multiple dimensions?” said Ant Casson, former Squadron Commander in the Royal Air Force and VRAI’s business development lead for the UK and Europe. “The possibilities are endless for VADE, enabled by the powerful tools provided by Cesium for Unreal.”

The VADE library includes 3D models of aircraft, tanks, and other vehicles. Courtesy VRAI.

VADE is dual use: in addition to its defense value, the app’s live 3D COP enables better decisions with real data for emergency services, disaster relief, critical national infrastructure planning, large event planning, and agricultural monitoring.  

Learn to integrate 3D geospatial data when clarity, confidence, and speed matter most. 

VRAI Delivers Virtual All-Domain Environment with Cesium for Unreal 

The Cesium team will be at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) in Orlando, Florida, December 1-4! I/ITSEC is the world’s largest gathering of professionals in modeling, simulation, and training, and we’re excited to be a part of it once again. 