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Media & Entertainment

Lu Zhang is perhaps not the only person who sometimes finds running on a treadmill monotonous. During a recent workout he thought how much nicer it would be to run through some of the neighborhoods he used to live in. Since a quick flight to Paris or Shanghai for a run wasn’t realistic, he asked an AI chatbot a simple question: was it possible to recreate real-world neighborhoods in an immersive environment? That was the first time he’d heard of Cesium.

With EarthRunner, Lu is able to take his treadmill runs to cities all over the world. Courtesy Lu Zhang.

As a neuroscientist, Lu has studied spatial navigation—how the brain combines self-motion with external landmarks to represent and move through the world. With AI tools as a learning and prototyping partner, he brought that neuroscience background into geospatial technology and created EarthRunner.

The Parthenon in Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles. With Cesium for Unreal, runners can explore revisit familiar places or explore new areas. Courtesy Lu Zhang.

EarthRunner lets users run through a full-scale 3D world of real places, built with Cesium for Unreal streaming Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles. Locomotion is controlled by the treadmill, and an accompanying iPad interface, created with Python, handles navigation.

A chance to run in familiar cities made workouts more engaging. Lu further enhanced the experience with an AI-powered audio guide that highlights points of interest, making it easy to get to know new places. While EarthRunner remains a personal project, Lu sees possibilities far beyond his own workouts.

An AI-powered audio guide highlights points of interest. Courtesy Lu Zhang.

“AI gave me the confidence to try something completely new with Cesium for Unreal. Seeing the world appear almost exactly as I remembered it from my travels was completely amazing. And when I moved beyond experimenting, the Cesium documentation made it much easier to really understand the platform. After that, it felt like a whole new world opening up.” 

Lu may not have known about Cesium before he began this project, but it enabled him to take an idea sparked during a workout into an application that surpassed his original goals. Lu is now a Cesium Certified Developer, a testament to how accessible 3D geospatial development can be with the right resources. If you’re new to Cesium for Unreal, check out our tutorials to get started building your own custom application with global 3D datasets.

Bringing Earth to the Treadmill with Cesium

Last month Camptocamp released Geo Challenge, a browser-based game built on CesiumJS that challenges users to identify randomly selected locations in Switzerland, France, or Germany.

Geo Challenge awards players points based on how close their guesses are to a 3D view’s actual location. Courtesy Camptocamp.

The game uses high precision datasets—swisstopo’s high‑resolution topographic data for Switzerland and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles served by Cesium ion for France and Germany. The game is purely for fun, but the simple interface belies the sophistication of the massive datasets, 3D tiling pipelines, and geospatial rendering that make it possible. By using CesiumJS, Camptocamp transforms complex 3D data engineering into a playful, interactive experience that invites users to feel the value of high-precision geospatial data.

GeoChallenge by Camp to Camp

“With Cesium we’re able to give players a view of their countries with such accurate terrain that many are able to recognize the spot instantly. Players aren’t just guessing coordinates; they’re exploring.” 

- Frédéric Junod, Camptocamp developer and the game’s creator

In Switzerland, Geo Challenge uses swisstopo’s high-resolution datasets, rendering every peak and valley of the country. Courtesy Camptocamp.

Camptocamp shares Cesium’s commitment to open, collaborative technology and has extensive experience building with CesiumJS. A decade ago they worked with Switzerland’s Federal Office of Topography, swisstopo, to build an interactive 3D map of the entire country using CesiumJS. They were also an early adopter of Cesium’s subsurface rendering capabilities, used to show geological features below ground. Camptocamp is a Cesium Certified Developer organization, and they continue to provide geospatial services for companies and governments in Europe.

The Swiss players in particular are intensely competitive (and very good!), with many players having near perfect scores. Courtesy Camptocamp.

To see what experiences you can create with 3D geospatial data, try out CesiumJS.

Cesium Powers Camptocamp’s Geo Challenge Game

The E1 Series is the world’s first all‑electric race boat championship, bringing together cutting‑edge engineering, global competition, and high-profile star power. With celebrity‑owned teams and events spanning iconic waterfronts from Jeddah to Monaco, the sport pairs high performance with high glamour. Its RaceBirds—ultralight carbon craft powered by a 150 kW electric motor and lifted by hydrofoils—slice across the water at speeds of up to 50 knots, showcasing the future of sustainable racing and raising awareness for marine conservation.

For such an innovative sport, it should be no surprise that E1 provides a premium digital fan experience, created by BADASS Studios using Cesium for Unreal.

BADASS uses Cesium for Unreal to build a digital replica of E1 race venues, which is used in live broadcasts. Courtesy BADASS Studios.

BADASS builds a precise digital replica of every E1 race venue in Unreal Engine to provide an accurate, large‑scale replica of the environment with event-specific markers, sponsorship markers, and more for enhanced fan experience. Courtesy BADASS.

BADASS Studios: Digital Fan Experience for E1

Building the scene with Cesium for Unreal

For each race, BADASS builds a precise digital replica of the venue in Unreal Engine, using Cesium for Unreal to bring in Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles, which provide an accurate, large‑scale replica of the environment. BADASS artists then add event-specific elements: waypoint markers, shoreline grandstands, and custom buildings along the route, as well as lighting and color adjustments for a vibrant look. They also place sponsorship overlays: a win-win that provides high visibility for sponsors without polluting the oceans and views with billboards or other debris.

Still image of an E1 Series broadcast in Monaco. Courtesy BADASS Studios.

“BADASS operate at the intersection of creativity and technology. Their team take complex data, live telemetry and, working within the constraints of live broadcast, turn them into compelling XR experiences. They are agile, solutions-focused and deeply collaborative and have quickly become an essential extension of E1's content and product function.”

- Laurence Boyd, Chief Content and Product Officer, E1

The digital replica in Unreal provides a critical resource for live broadcasts of the race. During events, BADASS receives updates from a live telemetry feed that captures boat position, lift, trim, throttle, RPMs, and more. Their platform sanitizes the data and maps it onto the digital replica so every animation, AR label, and camera angle is synchronized with what’s happening on the water. Cesium’s geospatial accuracy means AR overlays don’t rely on tracking the broadcast feed. When the environment is removed and replaced with live video, the overlays stay perfectly aligned, enabling broadcast‑quality XR even in chaotic conditions where drone restrictions, line of sight challenges, or hardware issues can disrupt traditional filming.

With all the resources available in the Unreal environment, broadcasters can provide viewers with a visually interesting and deeply informative video by cutting back and forth between a live camera feed of the race, the digital replica in Cesium for Unreal, and a hybrid AR view of the race with data on the RaceBirds’ telemetry.

BADASS provides AR overlays for broadcasts of races, like this race in Monaco. Courtesy BADASS. 

The Cesium replica of the race isn’t just for broadcasts. Fans who come to watch the E1 Series can also take part in the races themselves in a game simulator. Players pick a team and a RaceBird and try their hand at piloting through the course, using the same environment BADASS built in Cesium for Unreal to use in course explainers and live broadcasts of the race. For onsite attendees, these simulators fill downtime between races and deepen engagement. In the future, these environments will also be published as a game on Steam and other platforms, allowing fans to play at home.

“Cesium’s streaming and geospatial accuracy give us a single environment we can reuse across course explainers, AR broadcast graphics, and interactive experiences, which makes delivery faster and the output more consistent.”

BADASS Studios reuses the same Cesium for Unreal race venue for VR and AR broadcasts and for simulations. They bring their adaptable approach to multiple live events, as shown in this simulation of the FIA Extreme H World Cup in Qiddiya City, Saudi Arabia. Courtesy BADASS Studios. 

This multi-use approach—creating a single environment that can be reused in marketing, broadcasting, and games—is only possible because of Cesium’s geospatial accuracy and streaming efficiency. Such reusable content deployed in so many ways simplifies the process for E1, which can solve many needs with a single digital twin, and for BADASS, which maximizes the use of the assets it builds.

In addition to the E1 Series, BADASS Studios supports a number of events, including the FIA Extreme H World Cup, an off-road race of hydrogen powered SUVs, and FIM World Supercross Championship. With a scalable platform built on Cesium, they plan to expand into other sports and entertainment live events, giving viewers in any location an enhanced connection to real events.

To build a geospatially accurate environment you can deploy in numerous ways, try out Cesium for Unreal.

Creating an XR Connection to the E1 Series with Cesium for Unreal

Matteo Massimi is an avid mountaineer. So when he took his most recent trip to Central Asia, there was nothing unusual about the hikes. What was new was his ability to plan the expedition in the app he created with Cesium: Trailamo.

Trailamo uses CesiumJS to bring open geospatial data to mountaineers so they can plan safer, more informed routes anywhere in the world with advanced 3D terrain analysis and layered datasets.

Trailamo demo

Trailamo is built on CesiumJS and tailored to the way an explorer like Matteo, looking for off-the-map adventures, plans outdoor experiences. With a highly precise WGS84 ellipsoid and the ability to render high-quality geospatial datasets, CesiumJS gives Trailamo a solid foundation for its sophisticated terrain analysis and numerous planning tools. 

Explorers can create their own routes in Trailamo, dropping waypoints and comparing against public routes, as in this climb of the southwest face of the Matterhorn. Courtesy Trailamo.

“I’m not a software developer by training, but I knew what features I needed in the ultimate mountaineering app. So I looked for what tools were available to a noob like me, and with Cesium I could build exactly what I needed.”  

Trailamo offers global terrain and imagery for planning an outing anywhere on the planet. Beginning with Cesium World Terrain, users can then choose from a variety of imagery layers, such as topographic maps or satellite imagery. For a photorealistic view of well-known areas, they can also view global Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles.

Trailamo aggregates open data, using CesiumJS to give viewers access to public datasets for planning outdoor experiences, as in this view of Mont Blanc in the Alps from the French approach. Courtesy Trailamo.

Above this base, users can add overlays, such as live snow coverage from NASA GIBS, weather data from OpenWeather, ski pistes from OpenSkiMap, hiking trails provided by various collections of public GPX tracks, and more.

By combining terrain, imagery, and overlays, users can better understand upcoming adventures. Here hiking trails, publicly available routes, ski runs, and terrain contours are all shown with OpenTopoMap imagery draped over Cesium World Terrain at Fizkul Peak in Kazakhstan. Courtesy Trailamo.

Trailamo offers free accounts. Matteo, a strong supporter of open data, believes that high‑quality outdoor tools shouldn’t hide essential information behind steep subscription fees—especially when much of that data is generated by publicly funded government agencies as a public good. If citizens have already paid to collect it, he argues, they shouldn’t have to pay again to access it.

Terrain analysis tools, such as this calculation of avalanche angles at Aconcagua, Argentina, give adventurers a better understanding of their surroundings so they can mitigate their risk in unknown territory. Courtesy Trailamo.

Matteo has also written a number of tools for specialized terrain analysis. Because CesiumJS exposes the quantized mesh in its terrain pipeline, Matteo was able to calculate normal vectors for each triangulated surface and use that calculation to display altitude and slope gradient, avalanche angles, and terrain aspect and contours. 

Combining layers and overlays with tools can help users answer very specific questions about planned trips. In this screenshot of the Trans-Ili Alatau range in Kazakhstan, only peaks above a certain altitude are visible, and the slope gradient is colored to give a better understanding of the steepness of the terrain. Courtesy Trailamo.

Because Trailamo uses Cesium to aggregate numerous public datasets into a single app, users can combine them for better insights. This means that skiers can look at runs in their area overlayed with NASA‑collected snow coverage and check for avalanche angles in the backcountry for areas of risk. Hikers venturing into remote areas without widely published guidebooks and trails can look at the 3D terrain and overlay that with GPS tracks collected by OpenStreetMap to infer where others have traveled—quite literally following in past footsteps.

“Aggregating this open data with Cesium gives me the tools to have free outdoor experiences that would have been much more challenging, if not impossible, ten years ago. I’ve climbed new mountains because of Trailamo.” 

Matteo’s future plan is to continue to expand Trailamo’s data offerings, bringing in more open source data and allowing users to add their own open source imagery or overlays. 

To bring together the datasets you care about, sign up for a free Cesium ion account.

Planning Mountaineering Routes in CesiumJS with Trailamo

Stoian (Boe) Andrei’s greatest passion is VR. He loves the way a headset can transport you from your room to another place. So when, at 15 years old, he saw the announcement that Google Earth data would be available in Unity via Cesium for Unity, he began developing a VR app to transport viewers anywhere on the planet. 

Neuschwanstein Castle, Germany. WorldLens allows users to explore anywhere on the planet with Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles streamed in Cesium for Unity. Courtesy WorldLens. 

WorldLens uses Cesium for Unity to stream massive geospatial datasets to lightweight hardware. Boe selected Cesium for Unity because the geospatial platform provides exclusive capabilities and customization flexibility required for the app’s performance and fidelity.

WorldLens VR

Stepping into WorldLens on Meta Quest 3 is like stepping off a satellite. Users gaze around at the stars as they float down to Earth, the world at their fingertips. And the whole world really is there to explore.

Horseshoe Bend, Arizona. With World AI, users also get personalized insights as they explore. Courtesy WorldLens.

Users plan upcoming trips, time travel through historical imagery, revisit their childhood homes, or watch the sun rise over distant mountain ranges. With features like multiplayer and street view, WorldLens helps users connect outside their own headset.

The app is more than just a viewer: Boe has integrated the Open AI API to offer AI insights wherever users may go, in any of 2,000 languages. Users can ask for a tour of Bucharest, get insights into Victoria Falls, or request help finding a better route home.

Meteora, Kalabaka, Greece. WorldLens allows explorers to examine both the natural and built environment in locations both familiar and exotic. Courtesy WorldLens.

Boe has focused his development on performance tweaks that bring high performance 3D Tiles over even limited connections to viewers around the world. Boe leaned on the Cesium community forum and his own C# expertise to push optimization to the limit, offering efficient streaming and dynamic settings that adapt to users’ connection quality and device capabilities. Even users far from Google’s servers can enjoy smooth terrain rendering and fast loading.

“The amount of advanced and exclusive optimizations available in Cesium lets WorldLens offer the best 3D quality on the market, with the most complete Google Earth experience and smoothest performance averaging > 70 fps.” 

Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. With Cesium for Unity providing access to global datasets, users can travel to any spot on Earth and then enter Google Street View to explore the area. Courtesy WorldLens.

Cesium for Unity unlocked streaming massive datasets in hardware as light as the Quest, making experiences like WorldLens possible. To bring real world data into your app, try Cesium for Unity.

WorldLens Delivers High-Performance VR Exploration with Cesium for Unity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GliderSim

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

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

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

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

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

Glider Sim Players Fly the World with Cesium

The English Premier League reigns supreme among domestic football leagues (soccer in the US), celebrated for its elite talent, fast-paced matches, and unmatched reach. Belgium-based Boost Graphics uses Cesium for Unreal and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles to create a series of dynamic 3D map animations, known as locators, that provide a fresh perspective on the geography of the league's stadiums across the United Kingdom for a global TV audience of around 3.2 billion.  

Boost's locator guiding Premier League's TV audience along the River Tyne to the home of Newcastle United, St. James Park. Courtesy Boost Graphics.

Boost Graphics/Premier League: Newcastle United, St. James Park, UK

Tim Van Dingenen, Boost’s technical motion design team lead, explained that the locators are part white-knuckle ride and part geography lesson. “Viewers can learn more about the area of England where the game is being played, and the journey there,” he said. “And we wanted their experience to look as good as something you could capture with a drone or helicopter.” 

The Premier League approached Boost with the project in June 2023, requiring detailed visualizations for each of the league's 20 stadiums. They sought 80 videos, in short and long formats for varying broadcast time, and both day and night versions to match the time of the match.  

And the Premier League required all 80 videos before the start of the 2023-24 season, giving Boost two months to complete the project.  

Boost's Premier League locators come in two versions, tailored for use based on timing of the game. Courtesy Boost Graphics.

Boost has been building 3D maps since 2015, starting with visualizations of the Tour de France for European and US broadcasters. Van Dingenen estimates that building those visualizations took 15-30 hours for each of the race's 21 stages to download a mix of satellite and open-source terrain, landscape, and land mass data, including buildings, forests, and water features. Combining and loading the data into the expansive and detailed scenes required 120 gigabytes of RAM.

Creating interactive 3D visualizations became easier for Boost when Google replaced manually modelled buildings with photogrammetry-based models in Google Earth. It became easier, more realistic, and more performant with Cesium for Unreal and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles.  

Built on open standards and APIs, Cesium for Unreal combines the 3D geospatial capability of Cesium with the high-fidelity rendering power of Unreal Engine, unlocking the 3D geospatial ecosystem for game engines. Cesium for Unreal enabled Boost to integrate multiple data formats, including photogrammetry and purchased BIM models, into their Premier League locators. This capability proved particularly useful in visualizing a completed Everton Stadium, which was undergoing construction while Boost was completing their project.  

Boost was well covered with the other stadiums. Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles offer high-resolution 3D maps in many of the world's populated areas. “You put in the GPS coordinates of where you want to work, and Cesium just immediately loads in everything,” said Van Dingenen. 

Photorealistic 3D Tiles use the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) community standard 3D Tiles format. This format, created by Cesium, efficiently streams massive amounts of data.  

The Boost team made their deadline, with several days to spare. “We did about 90 days of work in 30 days,” said Van Dingenen. He estimates that Cesium for Unreal and accessing Photorealistic 3D Tiles saved Boost around US $75,000 in labor hours. 

Boost's team working with Photorealistic 3D Tiles in Unreal Engine. Courtesy Boost Graphics.

Pairing Photorealistic 3D Tiles with Unreal Engine allowed Boost to replicate natural light, shadows, and fine surface detail viewers would notice in the real world. “We couldn’t have done this without Cesium,” Van Dingenen said while demoing a night fly-over of Everton Stadium, featuring streetlights shimmering off the River Mersey.

Boost Graphics is working on a fresh batch of animations for the 2025-26 Premier League season, which kicks off in August.  

Follow the Cesium for Unreal tutorials to bring immersive 3D geospatial to your Unreal Engine projects.

Boost Graphics Uses Cesium to Give Premier League's Global Audience a Geography Lesson

On any given Sunday, Cesium for Unreal and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles are used to orient and immerse FOX Sports' football fans.

Atlanta to Hollywood on FOX NFL SUNDAY. Courtesy FOX Sports.

FOX NFL SUNDAY Atlanta to Hollywood

For FOX NFL SUNDAY, the XR team builds virtual 3D cities to highlight team locations and then fly to the studio in Los Angeles, where the crew of analysts and Hall-of-Famers comments on the matchups of the day. These immersive 3D models are a new feature this season, enabling FOX Sports to visualize specific skylines and customize them with lighting and atmosphere each week for the best production quality and value. Designed for city scale, Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles show viewers the details they would encounter in the real world and reduce FOX’s need to acquire data in other ways.

FOX Sports' XR team uses Cesium for Unreal and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles to build virtual 3D cities to highlight game locations, like the Steelers-Falcons matchup in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Courtesy FOX Sports.

The NFL's 32 teams have 30 full-time stadiums and cities among them, plus the occasional international trip. Because Google Maps Platform’s Photorealistic 3D Tiles pull from Google's extensive high-resolution imagery, FOX Sports is well covered with game locations, and draping this imagery over 3D mesh and formatting it as 3D Tiles provides accurate geospatial context for fans, optimized for streaming for the on-air graphics team.

FOX Sports' XR specialists combine Photorealistic 3D Tiles; their own 2D imagery; and 3D models of clouds, water, watercraft, and hand-modeled trees in Unreal Engine, fusing these disparate datasets of varying sizes, georeferencing them, and streaming them via Cesium ion and Cesium for Unreal. Fans see a polished, realistic scene that seamlessly transitions to commentators in the studio.

“In the past, we’ve used aerial imagery, but we have not encountered a tool that has allowed us as much flexibility and detail as Cesium. We put a high value on our production quality, bringing out the most in our brand,” said Zac Fields, SVP of Graphic Technology at FOX Sports. “Beyond a cool visual, it’s very informative, showing cities around the world with context.”

After seeing the matchup location, the viewer flies to the studio in Los Angeles. Courtesy FOX Sports.

FOX NFL SUNDAY airs at 12 p.m. ET. Fields plans to extend the Cesium/Google combo to other sports, like international soccer and Major League Baseball. 

Learn to add Photorealistic 3D Tiles to your Unreal Engine project, and bring both art and information to your viewers.

Cesium Orients and Informs FOX Sports Football Fans

DiscovAR Dublin, Dublin’s first AR 3D map, uses Cesium for Unity and Google Maps Platform’s Photorealistic 3D Tiles to go beyond traditional guidebooks and internet searches, bringing hidden gems to the city’s explorers on their mobile devices.

DiscovAR Dublin brings real-world 3D data to users to immerse them in the city’s culture, either in Dublin itself or from their homes across the world. Courtesy Peel X.

DiscovAR Dublin brings real-world 3D data to users to immerse them in the city’s culture, either in Dublin itself or from their homes across the world.

DiscovAR Dublin

DiscovAR Dublin was released in summer 2023 and is the fourth experience in the Dublin Discovery Trails app, developed by Peel X. The app won second prize at the European Cultural Tourism Network awards in October 2023.

The other experiences in the app—Balbriggan Heritage Trail, Castleknock Heritage Trail, and Doors into Docklands—rely on 2D to share the area’s rich history. DiscovAR Dublin brings real-world 3D data to users to immerse them in the city’s culture, either in Dublin itself or from their homes across the world. Highlighted locations include Epic: The Irish Emigration Museum, the Guinness Storehouse, and 14 Henrietta Street, a restored 18th century home.

Rather than creating their own separate apps, multiple Dublin stakeholders put their resources into Dublin Discovery Trails, including local authorities, tourism, and the smart city program. 

“These projects are never about downloads and ROI; they’re about user experience and pushing the boundary of the tech,” said Barry Rogers, Dublin City Council member who oversees tourism technology projects. “Cesium enabled us to push boundaries with this experience for our city.”

The Little Museum of Dublin, viewed in DiscovAR Dublin from a hillside in Devon, UK. Courtesy Peel X.

With Cesium for Unity, Google’s Geospatial Creator, and Photorealistic 3D Tiles via Google’s Map Tiles API, Peel X designed DiscovAR Dublin to stream massive 3D datasets as 3D Tiles to users’ iOS and Android devices, balancing a smooth rendering process with bandwidth conservation. Peel X noted Unity’s integrated development environment for building this 3D tourism experience and its ease of output to the mobile marketplace, all helping to get DiscovAR Dublin into the hands of curious travelers. Accurate locations and geospatial context are vital for truthfully representing the city’s landmarks and history and for wayfinding among the attractions. Gamifying a tour of Dublin and presenting the experience in 3D helps with connection for in-person visitors, mobile-only visitors, and even residents. 

Peel X’s Jon Martin, lead developer, and Jessica Wright, managing director, shared their curiosity about the role the metaverse may play in tourism and urban planning in the future. 

“Peel X plan to explore further uses of Cesium within products and outputs over the coming months, not only to enhance existing work but drive new routes to market and offer new solutions to clients. Cesium opens up digital twin capabilities and allows us to blend existing data feeds into a real-time shared experience that will aid complex remote geospatial conversations globally,” Martin and Wright said.

Future 3D experiences in Dublin Discovery Trails could include aerial tours and added interactivity.

Gamifying a tour of Dublin and presenting the experience in 3D helps with connection to the city. Courtesy Peel X.

With cultural information and immersive 3D, DiscovAR Dublin promotes exploration and piques interest for future visits. 

What are you building with Cesium for Unity? Follow our guide to add Photorealistic 3D Tiles to your project.

DiscovAR Dublin Highlights the City’s Hidden Gems with Cesium for Unity

The Red Bull X-Alps 2023 started this week, and you can watch it from anywhere in the world with a live tracking app built on CesiumJS. 

Live tracking the Red Bull X-Alps in 2023.

Red Bull X-Alps 2023 - LIVE TRACKING

This is the twentieth anniversary of the World’s Toughest Adventure Race, a nearly two week long race for the world’s best hike-and-fly athletes, who hike, run, and paraglide across the Alps. Champion Christian Maurer, who has won the previous seven races, will be back to compete against new and returning athletes from around the planet.

While only thirty athletes and their supporters compete, anyone can participate in an immersive digital experience by live tracking the race in an app built by zooom productions with CesiumJS. 

During the last Red Bull X-Alps, the interactive site had more than 4 million visits, not to mention the many more people getting updates on YouTube and social media. 

The race is complex and dynamic. Athletes pass 12 turnpoints in five countries, but between those turnpoints they adapt their routes to the terrain and weather, and given the extended distances and time involved, anything can happen.

Route of the Red Bull X-Alps 2023. Image courtesy Red Bull X-Alps. 

Viewers following the race in real time in the CesiumJS app can view athletes' positions, on land or in air, on a 3D map, along with metrics such as speed, altitude, and remaining distance. 

The athletes wear advanced GPS trackers so viewers can see their precise location–and current mode of travel. Image © Red Bull X-Alps.

“Live Tracking of the race provides fans with an immersive digital experience of this unparalleled race through some of the world’s most picturesque terrain. Cesium was the best framework to achieve our goals.” 

The race began June 11 and will run for nearly two weeks. 

Viewers can join athletes in the cockpit with a first person point of view. The app is built on CesiumJS, and basemaps are provided by Esri. Image © Red Bull X-Alps.. 

To visualize your own GPS tracks or other data in Cesium, check out our CesiumJS Quickstart tutorial. 

Live Tracking Red Bull X-Alps 2023 with CesiumJS

The latest episode of Building the Open Metaverse featured Michael Kass alongside hosts Patrick Cozzi of Cesium and Marc Petit of Epic Games. 

Michael Kass is a Senior Distinguished Engineer at NVIDIA and the overall software architect of NVIDIA Omniverse, NVIDIA's platform and pipeline for collaborative 3D content creation. Prior to NVIDIA, he was a Senior Principal Engineer at Intel, a Distinguished Fellow at Magic Leap, a Senior Research Scientist at Pixar, and a Principal Engineer at Apple Computers. Dr. Kass is also a champion juggler, dancer, and the winner of an Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement. 

Dr. Kass shared the origin of Omniverse, the vision behind USD, and current work on its optimization in a deep technical discussion. 

“Our idea of the metaverse is that you're going to have some description of the virtual world, which we think the right way to do that is USD. We think that's the way they connect all the metaverses together. And then, having done that, you want to visualize it in a variety of different ways. So, the science fiction literature is all about virtual reality or augmented reality, but there are people who are going to want to interact with these worlds through traditional desktop screens or tablets or anything else. And we want to support it all,” he said. 

Following that, he offered his advice for trying and succeeding at new things: 

“Just expect to be really bad at the new thing when you start it. And don't worry about that. People spend so much of their intellectual and their emotional energy worrying about whether they'll ever succeed at whatever it is, or whether they're being ridiculous, and what people think about them, and if you just avoid that, don't worry about that and just pay attention to what you want to learn and clear your mind of those other thoughts, then it's remarkable how much more progress you can make. So just follow your interest, do it, don't worry, and you'll make a lot more progress than you ever thought you could.”

In conclusion, the conversation turned back to the theme of the podcast and the importance of open standards. 

“I think it's really important for it to take off that it's about open standards like we've been talking about. This is way too big an idea for any one company to try to own and it's way too big, there are too many moving pieces. So I'm simultaneously kind of impressed at how much progress we've made so far, and humbled by how much remains to get to the vision that we have. And the only way we can get to where we want to get to is by harnessing the efforts of so many different people and organizations and putting them all together," Kass said. 

Listen, watch, or read the full episode, or subscribe to the podcast. 

Building the Open Metaverse: Collaboration with NVIDIA Omniverse

The Cesium for Unreal plugin brings geospatial to game engines, making it possible to create high fidelity digital replicas of the real world in Unreal Engine. From visualizing construction site surveys to national park tours, developers can give users access to high resolution virtual environments for insights that aren’t otherwise possible. 

But access to real world data doesn’t limit you to replicating the existing world. Unreal developers can project into the future by visualizing future building developments, analyzing potential solar energy installations, or simulating flight paths. 

Developers can also travel back in time to see what once was in a particular location. Light Heavy Industries, a multimedia design and technology consulting firm, is doing just that with Cesium for Unreal. They’ve created a replica of a fleet of ships that has all but disappeared. 

The Ghost Fleet at Mallows Bay, recreated in Cesium for Unreal by Light Heavy Industries. 

Mallows Bay in Cesium for Unreal by Light Heavy Industries

Mallows Bay

Mallows Bay is a United States national marine sanctuary where the remains of over 100 wooden steamships known as the Ghost Fleet now provide habitats for a variety of local wildlife. 

Photograph from Mallows Bay today, courtesy of Duke University's Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing Lab. 

Most of the ships were built for use in World War I, but the war ended before the ships could be used and they were brought to Mallows Bay, where their metal engines and propellers were to be salvaged. A century later, only a handful of these ships rise much above the waterline.

Few period photos exist that depict the full extent of the fleet at its peak, so we turned to Cesium and Unreal to see what that landscape might have looked like. This is the Future of History. 

With just skeletons of the ships in the water, there’s little to give visitors a sense of the extent of the fleet. To create that visualization, Light Heavy Industries used Cesium for Unreal. 

They started with contemporary and archival aerial imagery datasets, including a comprehensive survey of the site by Duke University's Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing Lab. Light Heavy Industries added these datasets to Cesium ion for streaming into Unreal Engine through the Cesium for Unreal plugin.

In Unreal Engine, Light Heavy Industries placed ship models at the location of the wreck outlines visible on aerial imagery to bring the ships back to life. 

They were able to then accurately position models of Ferris-class cargo vessels, which are typical of most of the ships in the fleet, at the locations where visible wreck outlines can be seen today. There are approximately 85 of these wrecks in all. 

Cesium World Terrain and Unreal Engine’s rendering effects simulate the whole environment of the fleet. 

Light Heavy Industries used Cesium's accurate terrain, in conjunction with Unreal Engine’s water capabilities, volumetric clouds, and exponential height fog, to complete the environment. They then built motion sequences, from which they created a demonstration video. 

Combining water, lighting, and atmosphere effects from Unreal Engine with real-world accuracy from Cesium helps users better imagine what was once here. 

To create your own simulations in Unreal Engine with high resolution terrain, download the Cesium for Unreal plugin. 

Surfacing Long Lost Shipwrecks with Cesium for Unreal

Reality Maps has built a high resolution digital twin of Golf Club Ruhpolding. Ruhpolding, a resort town in Germany, attracts tourists from around the world for both winter and summer outdoor activities. The virtual replica of the golf course, which is built on CesiumJS, captures the beauty, not just of the course itself, but of the surrounding mountains. The app is designed to encourage visitors to book a trip and also supports golfers in planning a visit.

The interactive digital map, created from a fusion of multiple aerial photomosaics and terrain datasets, offers detailed information about the course, each hole, and visitor amenities.

A high resolution digital twin of Golf Club Ruhpolding created by Reality Maps using CesiumJS.

Golf Club Ruhpolding in CesiumJS

Reality Maps created the 3D photogrammetry model from two scans they performed: a fixed wing drone survey of the whole area and a second scan with the Inspire drone of just the resort hotel (which was still under construction during the initial scan). 

The Ruhpolding scan was originally requested to support the robots that cut the grass on the course. 

Using RealityCapture, they created 3D meshes from the scans. In the app, the Alps that surround Ruhpolding come from another dataset collected by Reality Maps. 

The vivid colors of the model are thanks to color enhancement Reality Maps performed on the aerial imagery before texturing.

Reality Maps performs custom scans for customers to digitize their spaces for tourism, navigation, and for smart cities. Reality Maps makes many of these scans, like the scan of Golf Club Ruhpolding, available on the web with Cesium. 

To share your own datasets with Cesium, follow our tutorial to tile your 3D content with Cesium. 

Reality Maps Builds Digital Twins of Golf Resorts in Cesium