Cesium for Omniverse v0.25.0

Cesium for Unity Samples v1.16.1

CesiumJS 1.131

Federal & Defense

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.”

Hobu, Inc., with its deep roots in open-source geospatial, has led the contributions of standards and tools such as PROJJSON, ASPRS LAS, Cloud Optimized Point Cloud (COPC), and the Point Data Abstraction Library (PDAL). To enable Hobu’s users to visualize and interact with massive point clouds and raster data, the company developed its browser-based Eptium viewer using CesiumJS.

See Hobu and Eptium in action at the 2025 Cesium Developer Conference

Eptium builds upon CesiumJS to allow users to directly visualize and interact with COPC and Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF in the browser in 3D. Supporting these archive and transmission formats reduces data duplication and conveniently enables visualization of commonly available cloud content. Eptium makes city- or country-scale point cloud datasets accessible for visualization and analysis on the web, especially for disadvantaged users. Streamlined access to massive cloud-based datasets enables interactivity and understanding for a broad audience, including those in the field or students and professionals using devices without high-end graphics capabilities.

Eptium users can perform multipoint observer line-of-sight (LOS) analysis, generate viewsheds, and export GeoTIFF or SVG images directly from the browser without the need for specialized desktop software. They are able to collaborate by saving and sharing application view state as links. Customers use Eptium as a complete web application, build with it as a JavaScript developer bundle, or directly use it for free by visiting eptium.com and pointing at their own data.

Point cloud and viewshed of Montreal, Canada, in Eptium. Courtesy Hobu.

Distribution of point clouds as COPC eliminates the need for extensive preprocessing or local storage of large files. Eptium consumes COPC data on the fly, converting it into 3D Tiles in-browser for efficient streaming. Eptium optionally uses Cesium World Terrain via Cesium ion and Bing Maps Aerial imagery for additional geospatial context. For a comprehensive picture of areas of interest, this data is fused in CesiumJS, which was built for interactive web apps and scaling for massive datasets.

Eptium, COPC, and CesiumJS also power the moonlidar.com application that Hobu's Connor Manning created in support of NASA’s recomputation of the Moon’s elevation.

The Hobu team uses CesiumJS for moonlidar.com. Courtesy Hobu.

By combining Hobu's expertise with CesiumJS, the Hobu team empowers geospatial users by making complex 3D data accessible and actionable.

Learn to build your own CesiumJS app for 3D geospatial visualization and analysis on the web by following our tutorials.

Hobu's Eptium Visualizes Country-Scale Point Clouds with CesiumJS

With Ansys Systems Tool Kit (STK), engineers model land, sea, air, and space scenarios to understand the relationships among vehicles, payloads, facilities, and environments, including terrain. Ansys Geospatial Data Cloud (GDC) integrates Cesium ion Self-Hosted and global 3D content to provide STK with out-of-the-box access to accurate geospatial context within its time-dynamic simulations.

UAV over Boston in Ansys STK, with Geospatial Data Cloud using Cesium ion Self-Hosted. Courtesy Ansys.

STK was released in 1989 to serve US and allied aerospace and defense organizations, and GDC will be available to STK users in July 2025. Users may create virtual worlds including buildings, terrain, and other physical structures. Subsequently, an infinite number of simulation configurations may be exercised, resulting in a significant reduction in the dependence on physical prototypes.

Using Cesium, GDC will replace Ansys’ Geospatial Content Server, removing the need to develop and maintain their own real-world data, tilers, and hosting solution.

“Being able to use Cesium ion Self-Hosted has saved a significant number of man hours that can be redirected towards additional ways to take advantage of the unprecedented access to data. We estimate the time savings to be the equivalent of half a full-time employee,” the Ansys team noted.  

Cesium has helped Ansys enhance mission modeling since 2011.

Communication signal to noise over Boston in Ansys STK, with Geospatial Data Cloud using Cesium ion Self Hosted. Courtesy Ansys.

Cesium ion Self-Hosted provides hosting, tiling, and streaming for massive heterogeneous 3D geospatial datasets in users’ own clouds, data centers, or edge devices, enabling air-gapped solutions that meet strict security requirements and can be deployed to remote, disconnected environments.

GDC accesses Cesium World Terrain, Cesium World Bathymetry, Cesium OSM Buildings, Japan 3D Buildings and Terrain, and Cesium Moon Terrain via Cesium ion Self-Hosted. Accurate elevation data, depth data, and per-building metadata support planning and analysis in critical simulations. Cesium OSM Buildings are streamed as 3D Tiles in conjunction with Cesium World Terrain or Cesium World Bathymetry. Users can add their own datasets to be tiled into 3D Tiles for optimal streaming and visualization in STK.

UAV flying low over Boston in Ansys STK, with Geospatial Data Cloud using Cesium ion Self-Hosted.

Real-world data enables clearer pictures for analysis and decisions in complex multidomain scenarios.

Create and host 3D content in your own environment with Cesium ion Self-Hosted, and visit Ansys in the Cesium booth at GEOINT Symposium, #2231, to see Geospatial Data Cloud in action.

Hear from Ansys at the 2025 Cesium Developer Conference. Register to join us in Philadelphia in June.

Ansys Uses Cesium ion Self-Hosted for Geospatial Data Cloud

Our third installment highlights two more tracks at the 2025 Cesium Developer Conference: community-contributed aerospace and defense topics and sessions on Cesium, iTwin, OGC 3D Tiles, and other open technologies compiled by the teams at Cesium and Bentley Systems who work on them.

With Cesium’s roots in aerospace and commitment to interoperability and rapid innovation for tackling the hardest problems in 3D geospatial, we were excited to receive a group of full and lightning talk submissions focused on space, the Moon, flight systems, and mission-critical visualization and analysis.

To provide the community with a closer look into the advancements happening with Cesium and 3D Tiles, we decided to group a set of talks from the Platform team in Bentley Systems. The Platform team comprises development teams from Cesium, iTwin, and iTwin Capture, bringing together global geospatial, cloud-based-BIM (building information modeling), and reality capture.

Register for the Cesium Developer Conference

Calculating access to communications satellites in DigitalArsenal's OrbPro. Courtesy DigitalArsenal.

In today’s complex geopolitical environment, we’re seeing expanded interest in access to open geospatial technologies. Recent investments in the space industry have created satellite constellations with thousands of new spacecraft in just the last few years, and we’re hearing from developers who want to implement full global geospatial 3D experiences for training, planning, operations, and analysis.

These trends are reflected in the talk submissions we grouped in the Aerospace and Defense track, including:

A presentation by Maxar on 3D Tiles and One World Terrain

A photogrammetry sandbox built with Cesium for Unreal by the French Air Force

A flight status indication system from Takram

Military planning using agentic AI from our former colleague Brady Moore

Astronaut training on the Moon with Buendea

The Aerospace and Defense sessions are in a track the morning of June 24, and a series of seven lightning talks will be featured during the afternoon of the 24th on the main stage.

Maxar Precision3D Surface Model of Kabul International Airport. Courtesy Maxar Technologies.

We want the community to take center stage, and we want to feature enough sessions that developers can get a taste of what is happening now that Cesium is part of Bentley Systems.

The track focusing on Cesium, iTwin, and 3D Tiles will feature sessions on topics such as:

Bringing AI analytical tools for reality capture data into Cesium ion

Working with BIM data and the Design Tiler

How Gaussian splats and 3D Tiles are coming together

An exploration of new user interfaces combining geospatial and BIM data from the Bentley iLab team

The Cesium, iTwin, and 3D Tiles track will run through the morning of June 24 and into the morning of June 25.

You can find out more about what’s happening with Cesium and 3D Tiles in the pre-conference Cesium Deep Dive workshop and in mainstage presentations.

An iModel of a Philadelphia Metrostation on top of an iTwin Reality Mesh shown in CesiumJS.

There are six tracks with over 90 full sessions and lightning talks. We’ll be releasing more information about our fantastic mainstage presentations soon, including a closing session that will feature two reality capture stories featured in recent news!

The full agenda for the conference is live. Read more about this year’s tracks on the Cesium blog.

Our speakers are excited to meet up with industry colleagues, share learnings, and hear feedback. Register to attend and connect with the community in Philadelphia. We’ll see you there.

Aerospace, Defense, and Open Geospatial Technologies at the Cesium Developer Conference

GEOINT Symposium is one of my favorite events of the year. It’s where the geospatial intelligence community comes together to share how we’re advancing national security through geospatial innovation, and Cesium is proud to once again sponsor and participate. 

Next week, May 19-21, you can find us in St. Louis at BOOTH 2231, where we’ll showcase the latest from Cesium’s 3D geospatial platform, from open standards to secure, mission-ready deployments, from seabed to space.

Visit Cesium in BOOTH 2231 at GEOINT Symposium 2025.

our Moon Lander Game, built with Cesium for Unreal and Cesium Moon Terrain,

One World Terrain Well Formed Format, powered by 3D Tiles, and

daily partner demos, including Ansys, Sedaro, The Weather Company, and C3.AI.

Working in a disconnected or classified environment? We’ll also highlight Cesium ion Self-Hosted and how it's supporting high-side workflows today.

You’ll also get a look at CesiumJS, Cesium for Unreal, Cesium for Unity, Cesium for Omniverse, and the new 3D Tiles for Godot plugin, developed through our ecosystem grant program.

Don’t miss Patrick Cozzi’s keynote on Monday, May 19, at 1:30 p.m. in the Government Hub, and the USGIF Modeling, Simulation & Gaming Working Group on Tuesday, May 20, at 4:15 p.m.

And, of course, join a great crew from across the geospatial community at the Cesium Reception Monday night at the Marriott St. Louis Grand, from 8:30 to 11:30 p.m. 

Stop by BOOTH 2231 or reach out to schedule time with the team. We look forward to connecting with you at GEOINT.

Cesium ion SaaS and Cesium ion Self-Hosted utilize containers to provide Cesium ion. Containers are cloud-native, lightweight, and stand-alone software packages that include everything needed to run a piece of software: the code, runtime, system tools, libraries, and settings. This encapsulation ensures that the software runs consistently across various computing environments, from development to testing and production, regardless of the underlying infrastructure. At the heart of any container is the base image, and Cesium has recently updated base images to use the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Universal Base Image as deployed by Iron Bank. Because containers are smaller than virtual machines, it reduces the surface area to patch and update as part of the software stack. 

Containers are smaller than virtual machines, reducing the surface area to patch and update as part of the software stack.

Iron Bank was created and is maintained by the US Department of Defense (DoD)’s Platform One group. The goal of Iron Bank is to provide trusted and vetted container images that can speed up deployment of commercial and open source software across the DoD. This is possible because there is an open process by which images are created and because the images are continuously monitored and continually updated for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) as part of the process that builds these images. Trust is an important part of what we do at Cesium, so it’s important that we are able to trust the source of our base container images and that our users are able to trust that we work to ensure a secure product for them. 

CVEs don’t exist only in the base image itself, although that is where most of them are found. To ensure we stay on top of security reports and prevent releasing vulnerabilities to our users, Cesium also scans for CVEs. CVEs are tracked through various internet databases, with contributions by companies, security researchers, and developers. CVEs generally are reported against software as they are discovered and can appear at any layer in your container—the operating system, your build tools, or your software dependencies. At Cesium, we use open source tools like Grype to identify CVEs and then mitigate them by constantly updating our dependencies or removing unnecessary pieces of software from our containers. We run these tools in our continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, so that no release happens without security checks. 

Creating a trusted software supply chain 

Another important consideration that has received more attention lately is the software supply chain. People consuming software are now more concerned about where their software comes from, how it’s built, and what other software is packaged inside the software they bought. With Iron Bank as the base image, there is a known and open source of the bottom layers of the container stack, including the system libraries and programs that are built on top of the operating system. 

Additionally, Cesium takes great care to analyze the JavaScript libraries we’re directly dependent on, as well as those that may be nested inside, to ensure that we are looking at what licenses the software is bundled with, if it contains any vulnerabilities, and if there are updates we should be using. To do this, we generate a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) using Syft, which analyzes not just the software we’re using but also the dependencies of that software. Using those SBOMs and a tool called Grant, we can determine what licenses our dependencies have so that we can avoid any unfavorable licenses. A full view of what this scanning looks like is illustrated below. 

In addition to monitoring for CVEs, Cesium also continually monitors our software for security vulnerabilities through Static Application Security Testing (SAST) and secret scanning. SAST analyzes application code to identify potential security vulnerabilities that can be mitigated prior to release. It looks for things like SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and buffer overflows. Secret scanning helps ensure that authentication parameters are not stored in the code, containers, configuration files, or other areas in the released product. The reports generated from these tools allow us to harden our code and provide assurances to users about the security of the Cesium ion environment. 

Software security can be hard, and it’s important to be vigilant and confident in the measures taken to ensure your software and your users’ data are secure. In addition to vetting our own software, vetting containers and their stacks can be very complex. Fortunately, we can rely on a solid base with Iron Bank and use sophisticated tools from the open source community to ensure that we are always following security best practices. 

Use Cesium ion Self-Hosted to support corporate policies or create air-gapped solutions that meet strict security requirements and can be deployed to remote, disconnected environments. Learn more about using Cesium in your own environment. 

Cesium ion Uses Iron Bank Container Images for Software Security 

Defense and other government agencies rely on current weather information, forecasts, and historical data for situational awareness and effective decision-making. The Weather Company (TWC) improves military training and planning by pairing its detailed weather data with geospatial context in apps using Cesium for Unreal and CesiumJS.  

WeatherverseTM provides accessible, accurate, and actionable government weather forecast data and visualizations to improve outcomes, reduce costs, and help protect lives. Courtesy The Weather Company.

The Weather Company: Weatherverse

TWC was founded in the 1980s, addressing needs across various industries, and began serving government agencies in 2022. Sudden changes in weather conditions affect personnel and equipment, even with otherwise meticulous planning.  

Weatherverse Sim prepares warfighters with accurate 3D visualizations of environments and conditions—such as strong wind, more rain, or less cloud coverage—simulating weather they might face in the field. With recording and playback, trainees can experience and memorize scenarios for anywhere in the world, and trainers can adjust future sessions. Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles are streamed with data from TWC’s SUN Spatial Data Services and other sources for a comprehensive picture. Weatherverse Sim has used Cesium for Unreal since 2023 to bring realistic weather elements and geospecific terrain to these simulations, increasing operational effectiveness. 

Weatherverse Sim uses Cesium for Unreal to combine weather elements and terrain. Courtesy The Weather Company.

Weatherverse Planner monitors the forecast for locations important to planning teams and their missions, so they know what impacts weather will have on aviation, communications, infantry, and more. Users set thresholds and alerts for conditions like lightning, wind, or precipitation, for example, to make better informed decisions. Weatherverse Planner can be used as a stand-alone solution or integrated as a widget within any CesiumJS-based app for reliable performance on the web, streaming Bing Maps Aerial imagery for the view from space. Fusing weather data and geospatial context instead of managing multiple separate systems concurrently saves time and lives. Weatherverse Planner has used CesiumJS since 2024. 

Weather risk, based on user-defined parameters, in Weatherverse Planner. Courtesy The Weather Company.

Precipitation in Weatherverse Planner. Courtesy The Weather Company.

Weather conditions in Singleton, Australia, in Weatherverse Planner. Courtesy The Weather Company.

SimCentric’s CesiumJS-based SAF-Foresight app for planning and safety for live fire exercises will deploy Weatherverse Planner as a plugin for Exercise Talisman Sabre 2025. Exercise Talisman Sabre is the largest combined military training activity between Australia and the United States, with other partner nations joining, and this year it will incorporate real-time weather information to improve readiness. 

The Weather Company has built on top of CesiumJS as a plugin to further support and integrate Weatherverse Planner. The TWC-Cesium Plugin includes the protocols for acquiring, storing, querying, and filtering weather data from its SUN weather and spatial data services and integrates with existing Cesium-based apps. It is in an experimental phase. 

“Cesium provides a deep and rich set of capabilities, especially with regards to 3D orientation and geospatial data visualization. The framework is also well documented, approachable, and performant,” said J.R. Cottingham, senior director for The Weather Company’s Weatherverse. 

Weatherverse Planner deployed as a widget in CesiumJS-powered SAF-Foresight. Courtesy The Weather Company and SimCentric.

TWC is working to improve Weatherverse Planner with additional weather visualizations, such as wind streams. 

Built on open standards to support interoperability and with commitment to rapid innovation, Cesium powers mission-critical applications to better understand the operational environment. Read more federal and defense-related stories. 

The Weather Company Brings Forecasts to Military Planning with Cesium 

Cesium VP of Business Development and Sales Operations Danny Williams has received a Patriot Award from Pennsylvania Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve (ESGR), an office of the US Department of Defense. This award recognizes extraordinary support for employees in the National Guard and Reserve.

The Patriot Award recognizes the combined commitments of Danny and Cesium.

Brady Moore, formerly Director of Mission Support at Cesium and a Major in the US Army Reserve, nominated Danny for the award. Brady serves as an Innovation Officer at 75th Innovation Command in New York City, where he specializes in Dense Urban and Subterranean operations.

“Danny provided exceptional support for my Reserve service. His vocal appreciation created a positive and supportive work environment, and he made sure my responsibilities were covered and my return to work was as smooth as possible,” Brady said.

Major General Wes Craig, Pennsylvania Chair Emeritus and Southeast Area Chair of ESGR, presented the award to Danny at the Cesium office in Philadelphia in December 2024. “It would be difficult for those in the uniformed services to perform their mission without employer support,” he noted.

Wes Craig, Danny Williams, and Brady Moore during the award ceremony.

“We are very honored to be recognized with this award and support those who serve in the Reserve Forces. We appreciate the values, leadership, and unique skills servicemembers bring to the workforce. I’ve worked with veterans and members of the Guard and Reserve throughout my career and have always appreciated the perspective and dedication they bring to their work,” Danny said.

Cesium recognizes that experience comes in many forms and development is continuous. Interested in joining us? Take a look at our open roles.

Danny Williams Honored with Patriot Award

Join Cesium at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) in Orlando, Florida, from December 2-5! 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.

Stop by BOOTH 221 for Cesium demos curated specifically for the modeling, simulation, and training community.

Here’s a preview of what you can expect:

 I/ITSEC is a great opportunity to engage directly with our leadership and engineering teams. We look forward to the opportunity to answer your questions and demonstrate the latest capabilities from Cesium. 

We will also be hosting a Cesium Happy Hour at our booth on Tuesday from 3-5PM.

Announced last year at I/ITSEC, Cesium ion Self Hosted provides an offline capability for hosting, tiling, and streaming massive heterogeneous 3D geospatial datasets. When Cesium customers need to move their solution to the high side or a disconnected environment, Cesium ion Self-Hosted is the way to go. 

At I/ITSEC this year, we will feature a dedicated station where you can get hands-on experience with Cesium ion Self-Hosted. Like what you see and want to try it out in your environment? You can sign up for a free 30-day evaluation of Cesium ion Self-Hosted right at the booth.

Cesium ion, the solution for hosting, tiling, and streaming 3D geospatial data, is now available for your own environment as Cesium ion Self-Hosted.

Cesium ion Self-Hosted

Explore Cesium Global 3D Content and Tiled Partner Data

We’ll also have all the Cesium Global 3D Content offline locally in our booth. This is the same data we ship to our Cesium ion Self-Hosted customers for hosting in their own local environment. 

Interact with these datasets in a Cesium Story hosted locally by Cesium ion Self-Hosted.

Cesium Moon Terrain: the first complete, accurate, and readily-accessible 3D dataset of the moon.

Cesium World Bathymetry:  a global bathymetry and topographic terrain tileset that enables 3D visualizations, simulations, and analytics for use cases like oil and gas exploration, navigation for unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs), managing offshore wind farms, and analyzing essential climate science.

Japan 3D Buildings and Regional Terrain Data: Providing a foundation for building digital twin applications and solutions in Japan.

Vexcel 3D Cities: High-quality 3D data models for more than 60 metro areas across the globe available for offline use with Cesium ion Self-Hosted.

Live demos of Cesium’s open source plugins for today’s leading creation engines like Unreal Engine and Unity

Built on open standards and APIs, these plugins combine the 3D geospatial capability of Cesium and 3D Tiles with today’s leading creation engines.

Cesium for Unreal - Integrated with Unreal Engine Editor, Actors and Components, Blueprints, and other UE features to enable a high degree of interactivity, physical realism, and photorealism to create amazing experiences.

Cesium for Unity - Cesium for Unity is tightly integrated with Unity making it possible to visualize and interact with real-world content in editor and at runtime. The plugin also has support for Unity game objects, physics, collisions, and character interaction.

Cesium for Omniverse - Cesium for Omniverse enables users to visualize and interact with a full-scale, high fidelity WGS84 globe within NVIDIA Omniverse to create, visualize, and analyze simulations in their precise 3D geospatial context.

Cesium Native - Cesium Native powers Cesium's runtime integrations and is an open source foundational layer for any 3D geospatial software, especially those that want to stream 3D Tiles.

A First Look at Cesium’s all new Design Tiler

To improve workflows and capabilities that place architecture, engineering, construction, and operations (AECO) content in a 3D geospatial context, Cesium has developed a new Design Tiler and Revit Add-In, now available for early access and feedback via our AECO Tech Preview Program.

These tools transform IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) and Revit files into 3D Tiles, the OGC community standard created by Cesium for streaming massive 3D geospatial datasets

Cesium has developed a new Design Tiler and Revit Add-In, now available for early access and feedback via our AECO Tech Preview Program. These tools transform IFC and Revit files into 3D Tiles, the OGC community standard created by Cesium for streaming massive 3D geospatial datasets. Join us in connecting architecture and geospatial.

Connecting Architecture and Geospatial: AECO Tech Preview Program

CesiumJS Example with One World Terrain’s Well Formed Format based on 3D Tiles: 

The past year has seen many great developments for 3D Tiles, including its use by NBC Sports for broadcast coverage of the Paris Summer Games. 

At I/ITSEC, we will be showing how we continue to evolve this OGC Community Standard developed by Cesium including specific enhancements that are part of the U.S. Army’s One World Terrain Contract. Stop by our booth to see live demos of new features in the One World Terrain Well Formed Format (WFF),  an extension of 3D Tiles.

Once again Cesium will bring partners into the booth to showcase how they are utilizing the Cesium Platform. Stay tuned for specific days and times these demos will be shown. 

Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), Gaming Research Integration Learning Laboratory (GRILL)  -  Presenting Glimmer, a VR application with Cesium Moon Terrain. (Wed. 1:30-6 pm; Thurs. 9:30 am- 3 pm)

Battle Road - Presenting AtomEngine, an Earth-scale realtime multiplayer simulation using Cesium World Terrain as well as their custom Cesium for Godot integration. (Tues. noon-6:30 pm; Wed. 9:30 am-1:30 pm)

Reveal - Presenting Farsight, a mobile first platform providing surveillance video, 2D, and 3D geospatial data for use in decentralized, comms-limited environments. (Tues. 2-6:30 pm; Wed. 1-30-6 pm)

Brightline Interactive - Presenting SpatialCore, Leveraging USD to bring AI to 3D environments with Cesium geospatial context. (Mon. 2-6 pm; Tues. noon-2 pm)

LuxCarta - Presenting BrightEarth, a web service that uses AI-enhanced production techniques offering high resolution building and tree extraction from from a range of sub-meter imagery sources rendered with CesiumJS. (Mon. 2-6 pm; Wed. 9:30 am-1:30 pm)

Northrop Grumman - presenting Helix, which uses Cesium for Omniverse to visualize generated synthetic training data. (Thurs. 9:30 am-3 pm)

Stop by BOOTH 221 or reach out to schedule time with the team. We look forward to connecting with you in Orlando!

It’s wildland fire season in the United States. The Lockheed Martin AI Center’s (LAIC) Joint Activity Manager (JAM) provides operational context for active wildland fires, using AI, real-time data, and CesiumJS to stream this 3D visualization to incident commanders.

Overview of Lockheed Martin JAM capability, featuring a sped-up clip of the Vista fire outside of Los Angeles, California. Courtesy Lockheed Martin.

Overview of Lockheed Martin JAM capability, featuring a sped up clip of Vista fire outside of Los Angeles, CA. Courtesy Lockheed Martin.

Lockheed Martin JAM - Vista, CA, July 2024

While still in development, this capability is intended for state agencies to visualize and analyze active wildland fires; track flights of aerial assets that have been tasked with detection, monitoring, and suppression; and incorporate weather information, such as temperature, humidity, and wind.

The wildland fire incident list in the application is populated every 24 hours with information from the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), based in Boise, Idaho, USA, to ensure daily updates on the number and locations of active wildland fires. Imagery from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) is pulled every 30 minutes. 

In an upcoming feature, Lockheed Martin’s AI will detect near-real-time fire hot spots from this imagery and reflect them atop 3D terrain from Cesium every 15-20 minutes. Lockheed Martin uses its “super resolution” AI capabilities to, in effect, add more pixels to the images, which refines them prior to determining the near-real-time fire area from the satellite imagery.

Tracking a Pilatus PC-12 on patrol identifying and mapping wildland fires in CesiumJS. Courtesy Lockheed Martin.

JAM brings together ground, air, and satellite data from NIFC, NOAA, and ADS-B flight trackers (as seen in the image above) and combines them in CesiumJS. State agencies might also have their own assets (e.g., thermal imaging from multi-mission aircrafts) that can be added. The application uses Cesium World Terrain and Bing Maps Aerial imagery streamed as 3D Tiles via Cesium ion, to provide incident commanders and staff an accurate 3D map to enhance the common operating picture. CesiumJS was built for interactive web apps and streaming massive amounts of data—it is lightweight and performant, vital for users receiving rapid updates in the field.

Work on the JAM prototype began in December 2023, and efforts on the current demo started in March 2024. Lockheed Martin, which employs 122,000 people worldwide, assigned five developers on this project. The company selected Cesium and its real-time update capabilities as an efficient, effective tool for visualizing historical wildland fire data. Lockheed Martin continues to leverage commercial partnerships to accelerate development of JAM.

Wind and weather information for an active fire area in CesiumJS. Courtesy Lockheed Martin.

Demo of suppression line visualization in CesiumJS. Courtesy Lockheed Martin.

The crew behind JAM is working toward including all active wildland fires in the US. The alpha version was completed in May 2024, and beta is slated for this summer.

You can fuse your own data with high-resolution terrain and imagery with Cesium ion; get started with a community account.

Lockheed Martin Tracks Wildland Fires with Cesium

Cesium held its inaugural 3D Geospatial Technical Exchange Meeting at Cesium headquarters in Philadelphia on June 25 and 26.

The purpose of the meeting was to bring experts in defense and intelligence together with the 3D Tiles user community to explore the theme, “Streaming 3D Geospatial Data, from Analysis to Mission Execution.”

Speakers from the Cesium team were joined by guest speakers from TAK Product Center,  Army Geospatial Center, Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division, NVIDIA, Reveal Technology, Epic Games, Maxar, Ansys, and Vexcel Data Program.

Highlights from Cesium's first 3D Geospatial TEM. 

Cesium 3D Geospatial Technical Exchange Meeting 2024

The event kicked off with a video message from Cesium CEO Patrick Cozzi, who spent the week in Alaska as part of the DoD Joint Civilian Orientation Conference (JCOC).  JCOC enables business and community leaders to gain first-hand experience through operations and interactions with troops and military leaders across the US armed forces.

Nathan Frantz, Acting Director of TAK Product Center, then delivered the keynote address. The event also featured live demos by teams from Reveal Technologies and Lockheed Martin. 


Visit our Presentations page for slides presented by Cesium on CesiumJS, Native Runtimes, Cesium ion and Cesium ion Self-Hosted, and Cesium curated 3D data. We also held a session to gather community feedback on the Cesium roadmap. 

This inaugural, invite-only TEM is only the first of many such events we hope to host at Cesium HQ and around the country to foster collaboration around open standards and gather feedback from the user community. Join our mailing list to be notified of upcoming events.

Cesium's Inaugural 3D Geospatial Technical Exchange Meeting

To derive additional value from digital twins, Brightline Interactive’s SpatialCore platform pairs AI and the Cesium for Omniverse extension for spatial computing, empowering enterprise and public sector users to combine massive datasets and perform complex calculations. Spatial computing is the use of accelerated compute to analyze and process spatial data, in order to derive insights, make predictions, and perform calculations on one-for-one digital twins.

Leveraging geospatial datasets for AI training and tuning. Courtesy Brightline Interactive.

SpatialCore’s users face challenges in infrastructure, maintenance and operations, and training and simulation. As planners and engineers consider updating roads or building new ones, for example, they can use a SpatialCore-enabled digital twin to estimate how long a road will last, based on where the road is, what it’s made of, typical weather conditions, annual traffic estimates, the weight of those vehicles, and more. As the inputs change, so do the outputs, visualized and analyzed in immersive 3D.   

Rapid simulation and calculation enable swift decisions. AI is incorporated into NVIDIA Omniverse-powered workflows to aid calculations, reduce the required technical expertise of users, and train both humans and non-human assets (e.g., drones) with a realistic understanding of Earth. 

SpatialCore leverages open data sources and standards for compatibility with a wide range of data and tools. Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD), created by Pixar Animation Studios as an extensible ecosystem for 3D worlds, and 3D Tiles, the Open Geospatial Consortium community standard created by Cesium, are streamed together for precise, scalable 3D scenes for collaboration on a multitude of devices. 

Real-time collaboration connecting and empowering teams. Courtesy Brightline Interactive.

“Global enterprise requires a global substrate. In principle, we can’t do what we’re doing without Cesium ion,” said Tyler Gates, general manager of Brightline Interactive.

SpatialCore employs a variety of data sources and tools for its complete picture. Brightline adds its own datasets and those of its clients, such as point clouds from drone scans, to Cesium ion, for hosting in the cloud, tiling into 3D Tiles, and efficiently streaming growing collections of data to Omniverse-powered applications and workflows. 

SpatialCore also uses Cesium ion to access Google Maps Platform’s Photorealistic 3D Tiles for line-of-sight visualization and Cesium OSM Buildings for building metadata via the Cesium for Omniverse extension. An accurate, full-scale WGS84 globe is included in the extension and enables SpatialCore’s vital calculations and resulting simulations. 

Immersive simulation on top of geospatial data. Courtesy Brightline Interactive.

Brightline Interactive will demo SpatialCore in Cesium’s BOOTH 1831 at GEOINT Symposium 1-5 p.m. ET on Tuesday, May 7, 2024.

Learn more about enabling 3D geospatial capability with Cesium for Omniverse.

Brightline Interactive Uses Cesium for Omniverse for Spatial Computing

Once again, Cesium will sponsor and participate in the nation's largest gathering of GEOINT professionals, the USGIF GEOINT Symposium 2024.

Join us at BOOTH 1831 in Kissimmee, Florida from May 6-8, 2024 to see how Cesium can address the needs of the GEOINT community.

Ansys Integration for Ansys Systems Tool Kit (STK), Ansys Digital Mission Engineering (DME) Component Libraries, and Ansys RF Channel Modeler

Ateo's Spatial Earth simulation in Unity and Apple Vision Pro

Brightline Interactive's Spatial Core Interface digital twin in NVIDIA Omniverse (stay tuned for more) 

French Air Force's CAP160 Heli Lab training simulation in Unreal Engine

Reveal Technology's Farsight platform for 3D geospatial data postprocessing and mission planning

Warfighting, Software, and the OTA

Hobu's Eptium Visualizes Country-Scale Point Clouds with CesiumJS

Ansys Uses Cesium ion Self-Hosted for Geospatial Data Cloud

Aerospace, Defense, and Open Geospatial Technologies at the Cesium Developer Conference

Cesium at GEOINT 2025

Cesium ion Uses Iron Bank Container Images for Software Security

The Weather Company Brings Forecasts to Military Planning with Cesium