Back in May, we announced plans for cesiumjs.com, with our goal being to advance the state of the art for 3D geospatial data on the web. We haven’t spoken much about it since then, but that’s because we’ve been focused on making it a reality. We are now rolling out our first round of beta invites, and we thought it...
To make progress on bugs of interest to the community and to help ramp up our new teammates, we are organizing a Winter Bug Bash on February 8–10. Once again, our partners at Bentley Systems will be hosting the AGI Cesium team. We need your help identifying bugs that are most important to you! You can help by Adding a...
We’re pleased to announce that Bentley Systems is joining Analytical Graphics, Inc. (AGI) as a founding member of the new Cesium Consortium. Bentley Systems is adopting Cesium to visualize and interact with highly detailed infrastructure engineering models set in the reality context of their surrounding environment. The digital engineering models are created with Bentley’s MicroStation and BIM applications, and the...
We’re thrilled to welcome Rachel Hwang to the Cesium team at AGI as a 3D Software Developer. Rachel just graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a master’s in computer graphics and game technology. While at Penn she was a teaching assistant for the computer graphics course, and she spent last summer working on VR at Prologue Immersive. Before attending...
This is a guest post by Serge Silaev about his GWT wrapper, a Java application for developing with Cesium using Google Web Toolkit (GWT) 2.8.0 and JsInterop. The work expands that of Rich Kadel, who introduced a GWT wrapper for Cesium in 2014. - Sarah JavaScript is the most common language for Web development and is suitable for very diverse...
Welcome to Shehzan Mohammed, who is joining the Cesium team at AGI as a 3D Software Developer today. Shehzan previously worked at ArrayFire, where he used CUDA, OpenCL, and OpenGL for GPU computing applications and helped lead the effort to make the ArrayFire library open source. Shehzan earned a master’s in computer graphics and game technology in 2013 at the...
Today we’re happy to welcome Austin Eng as a spring intern on the Cesium team at AGI. Austin is working on both a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a master’s in computer graphics and game technology at the University of Pennsylvania. Last summer he interned at DreamWorks, and in the summer of 2015 he interned at Disney. At Penn...
We are happy to announce the release of Cesium 1.29. Highlights include 3D Model silhouette rendering and 3D Model color/translucency blending. These are great highlighting effects. Label backgrounds to help make labels standout. Fixed translucency in Firefox 50. Fixed texture rotation for RectangleGeometry. For the full list of changes, see the change log. News For the fourth year in a...
On Christmas Eve, children and families from around the world will be able to track Santa’s progress in 3D with NORAD Tracks Santa. This is the fourth year Cesium is part of the NORAD Tracks Santa team, and this year tracking Santa will be better than ever! With the many performance improvements made to Cesium within the last year, visitors...
For this year’s Winter Code Sprint, the Cesium team once again went to the Pocono Mountains for a week of focused work and team building. As a new team member and first-time code sprint participant, this was a great opportunity to get to know the team. Also, as we are encouraged to work on something different from our day-to-day work,...
Cesium is in the news! Jim Sciutto of CNN interviewed Paul Graziani, the CEO of AGI, the company that started Cesium. Their interview was filmed in and about the Commercial Space Operations Center (ComSpOC); the visualizations of the ComSpOC analysis tool are built on Cesium and STK. The news story is about defending US satellite systems. It shows several satellite...
We are happy to announce the release of Cesium 1.28. Highlights include Improved terrain/imagery load ordering, which results in a 25% reduction in load times in many cases. Improved billboard, label, and point visual quality. Fixed support on Samsung Galaxy S7 and other systems that do not support the OES_texture_float WebGL extension. Terrain and imagery performance improvements. Left: 1.27. Right:...
Next week, the Cesium team will be going to the Pocono Mountains for our annual Winter Code Sprint. We like to organize two trips per year where can dedicate time to working on intensive projects and collaborating on things we might not get a chance to in our normal day to day. We have some exciting projects planned! Sean and...
Today we’re happy to welcome Erik Andersson as a full stack developer on the Cesium team at AGI. He will play a significant roll in our cesiumjs.com development work as well as contributing to core Cesium development. Erik graduated from Linköping University in Sweden with an MS in Computer Science and Engineering and an MS in Industrial Engineering and Management....
We are happy to announce the release of Cesium 1.27. Highlights include A slew of bug fixes throughout the codebase thanks to the Cesium Bug Bash. A new HeadingPitchRoll class for making it easier to work with object orientations. Improved KML compatibility. For the full list of changes, see the change log. News 3D Tiles passed the votes to enter...
We held the first ever Cesium Bug Bash last week, and it was a massive success! For three days, the Cesium team went over to Bentley Systems headquarters and worked on squashing some of the bugs that were most impacting the Cesium community. Cesium Team hard at work at Bentley Systems On day 1 we hit the ground running, tackling...
We’re happy to announce that we have two more students from Dr. Chris Murphy’s Open-Source Software Development course, CIS 399, at the University of Pennsylvania who will be contributing to Cesium this fall. In the course students learn about open source software development while simultaneously working on an existing open source project. As their industry mentor, I’ll give them guidance...
Patrick Cozzi, Dan Bagnell, and I represented the Cesium team at FedGeoDay 2016, which took place at the American Red Cross in Washington, DC, on October 13. In addition to attending, Patrick was the conference chair, and we both had the opportunity to emcee some of the sessions. We were also a sponsor. Ray Bauer of NGA giving his keynote...
It’s time to register for AGI’s International Users Conference. AGI, the founder of Cesium, is holding its second International Users Conference November 16–18 in Rome, Italy. The free event offers training and presentations on a variety of AGI technologies, including an entire track dedicated to Cesium. The track will guide STK users into enhancing the capabilities of their projects with...
We are happy to announce the release of Cesium 1.26. Highlights include Added support for clustering Billboard, Label and Point entities. #4240 Added DistanceDisplayConditions to all primitives to determine the range interval from the camera for when it will be visible. Fixed a bug where viewing a model with transparent geometry would cause a crash. #4378 For the full list...
We’re happy to be sponsoring the 2016 LocationTech Tour. The Philadelphia stop is coming up Thursday, October 6, at 6:30 p.m. Come hear Ross Bernet of Azavea share his experience diving into GIS, Dave Cole of Mapbox cover Mapbox Cities, and the Mapzen Search team discuss geocoding. And our very own Hannah Pinkos will be speaking about tracking Santa with...
FedGeoDay is just a few weeks away and the schedule is up. Now is a great time to register! We’re happy to see 3D will be a prominent theme of this one-day conference. Talks that focus on Cesium include: Cesium 3D Tiles: An Open Specification for Streaming Massive 3D Geospatial Scenes, Matthew Amato (Cesium). Our very own Matt Amato will...
We’re thrilled to have two students from the University of Pennsylvania contributing to Cesium this fall. Judy Weng and Sumit Shyamsukha are both in Dr. Chris Murphy’s Open-Source Software Development course, CIS 399. In the course students learn about open source software development while simultaneously working on an existing open source project. Students have to apply in order to be...
I’m very excited to announce that we will be hosting the first Cesium Bug Bash! Our friends at Bentley Systems will be hosting the AGI Cesium team for the event on October 19–21. During that time, we’ll be focused on closing as many bugs as we can. We’re also putting an emphasis on fixing bugs that are currently impacting the...
Cesium started as a software development effort to bring 3D geospatial to the web. In order to truly realize the potential of 3D on the web, we determined that new open formats were required to efficiently take advantage of 3D’s uniqueness. We introduced CZML, a JSON schema for describing time-dynamic 3D scenes, quantized-mesh for efficiently streaming terrain, and glTF, the...
We are happy to announce the release of Cesium 1.25. Highlights include Updated the online model converter. It now converts OBJ models to glTF with obj2gltf, optimizes existing glTF models with the gltf-pipeline, can bake ambient occlusion onto the glTF model, and compress geometry using the glTF WEB3D_quantized_attributes extension. Improved label quality for oblique and italic fonts. See #3782. Improved...
Ambient occlusion, or AO, describes how cracks, crevices, corners, and other small, semi-enclosed spaces tend to be darker than surrounding surfaces under real-world lighting conditions. Their insides are occluded, so ambient light can’t get in. AO adds realism to views rendered in Cesium and other real-time 3D engines and can also be helpful for bringing out details when a scene...
The WEB3D_quantized_attributes extension to glTF offers reasonable compression with little to no overhead for decompression. This meets the needs of 3D Tiles in Cesium perfectly because the 3D Tiles engine frequently downloads new tiles based on the view. Quantized 3D model files means smaller files, faster downloads, and less GPU memory usage with no performance degradation. All about Quantization The...
The global FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial) conference is just a few weeks away. We’re thrilled to see that Cesium will be a big part of the schedule. These talks and workshops by the community include Cesium: OL3-Cesium: 3D for OpenLayers, by Beraudo Guillaume of Camptocamp. Trying to visualize GIS & BIM information on the web: a...
We had another great trip to SIGGRAPH, the annual computer graphics conference! We kicked off this year's trip at the co-located Web3D conference. Sean Lilley and I presented the most comprehensive tutorial yet on 3D Tiles. The audience was highly engaged. The slides and sample tilesets are here. Sean presenting the 3D Tiles tutorial at Web3D. There was quite a...
We are happy to announce the release of Cesium 1.24. This is a bug fix release after a big Cesium 1.23 release. It is especially worth upgrading if you care about leap seconds as much as we do, as a new leap second was added for December 31, 2016. Also, MapQuest recently discontinued their support for direct tile access, so...
SIGGRAPH is next week! The conference, July 24–28 in Anaheim, California, will cover all things graphics. Be sure to add these Cesium-related events to your schedule: Monday ACM SIGGRAPH Cartographic Visualization (Carto) Birds of a Feather Monday, 25 July, 1:30 pm–3:00 pm, Anaheim Convention Center, ACM SIGGRAPH Theater, Hall C Sean Lilley will present the latest news on Cesium and...
This is a guest post by Måns Beckman, creator of milsymbol, about using milsymbol with Cesium. A background in military unit symbols is helpful but not essential to understanding this post. - Sarah milsymbol milsymbol is a JavaScript library for creating military unit symbols, described in standard documents such as MIL-STD-2525 for the USA and STANAG APP6 for NATO, that...
We are happy to sponsor the upcoming FedGeoDay conference! FedGeoDay has just posted a call for proposals. This is a fantastic one-day geospatial conference focused on federal government users with an emphasis on open source and open data. Many people in the federal government are using Cesium. This conference is a great place to demonstrate your work to your agency,...
You are invited to the annual Cesium BOF at SIGGRAPH to learn about the latest Cesium development and community news. There will be Cesium swag too. This is the Cesium event of the year! Here’s a preview of the program: Virtual Globes Using WebGL and Cesium Tuesday, July 26, 2016, 10:30 am–12:00 pm Anaheim Convention Center Room 203 B Tom...
Web3D 2016 is coming up July 22–24 in Anaheim, California. Co-located with SIGGRAPH, the conference explores the latest research and developments in web-based interactive 3D graphics. This year’s program, centered on the theme of “3D for all,” has some great presentations, including some that cover glTF. Be sure to attend the tutorial by Sean Lilley and Patrick Cozzi of the...
This is a guest post by Xavier Tassin, creator of GEFS-online, about his experience migrating from Google Earth to Cesium. - Sarah For five years I have been building GEFS-online, a free flight simulator, on the Google Earth plugin. When Google decided to retire the plugin, I made the move to Cesium as it offered the best alternative. I would...
We are happy to announce the release of Cesium 1.23. Highlights include Entities, KML, and GeoJSON terrain clamping. Up to 2x faster polygon triangulation using earcut. CZML consistency and documentation improvements. See the forum post. Ability to rotate the map in 2D. New Google Cardboard Sandcastle example. For more details and the full list of changes, see the change log....
For the Wednesday through Friday after Memorial Day Weekend, the Cesium team worked from beautiful Wildwood, NJ, down by the shore, for our semiannual code sprint. The code sprint is designed to be three intense days where team members pick projects with immediate impact. It also designed for socialization and ramping up for new team members. This was my first...
We are happy to announce the release of Cesium 1.22. This is the fiftieth public release of Cesium, which began with version b5, released in May 2012. This release includes some major visual quality improvements such as: Shadows, including self-shadows and soft-shadows for terrain, 3D models, and geometries, based on the sun position. Improved atmosphere, with day/night fade and hue/saturation/brightness...
We’re thrilled that Joshua Storm Becker is joining us today as a summer intern on the Cesium team at AGI. This summer, Josh will contribute to the gltf-pipeline and 3D Tiles. Josh is studying computer science at Princeton. While in high school, Josh participated in MIT’s MOSTEC program and worked for the NSA, where he used functional programming to implement...
Today we’re happy to welcome Gary Li as a summer intern on the Cesium team at AGI. This summer, Gary will contribute to the gltf-pipeline project, started by his classmate Richard Lee, by adding the ability to prebake ambient occlusion (AO) to create visually appealing 3D buildings in Cesium with 3D Tiles. Gary will also contribute to Cesium’s shadow renderer...
In this article we will be building a small, mobile Cesium Android app with Cordova from scratch. Cordova is a tool that allows users to build cross-platform mobile apps with web technologies. The major benefits of using Cordova with Cesium are having the ability to run offline and access local files, maintaining the native look and feel of Android, and...
GEOINT 2016 is coming up May 15-18 in Orlando, Florida. This symposium, hosted by the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF), has more than 4,000 attendees from academia, industry, and government sectors. It focuses on geospatial for intellgience and defense applications. AGI, the founder of Cesium, will be at booth 1232 in the exhibit hall. Come by to see how...
When we started Cesium in 2011, our goal was to advance the state of the art in 3D on the web and realize the Digital Earth vision. As an open-source project, Cesium has succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. It has become synonymous with 3D geospatial visualization and is the globe of choice across many fields, such as aerospace, defense, smart...
We are happy to announce the release of Cesium 1.21. This is mainly a bug fix release as we gear up for 1.22, which will be a major release with shadows. Highlights include: Added ability to import and export Sandcastle example using GitHub Gists. #3795 Added PolygonGraphics.closeTop, PolygonGraphics.closeBottom, and PolygonGeometry options for creating an extruded polygon without a top or...
FOSS4G NA 2016 is next week! We’re proud that this year Patrick Cozzi is on the organizing committee and that AGI is a sponsor of the conference. There will be a Cesium booth in the exhibit hall, complete with our brand new Cesium arcade machine. Come by to play a game, meet the core development team, and tell us about...
This is a guest post by Daniel Honaker about AGI’s attendance at Locate16. - Sarah What a difference a year makes! Locate15 was held last year in Brisbane, Australia, and it was the first time that AGI attended as an exhibitor. The Locate conference is the national conference of the spatial and surveying industries of Australia and New Zealand. We...
Wednesday, April 27, Autodesk is sponsoring a panel discussion on “3D in the Cloud: What Does it Mean?”. The discussion, in Washington, D.C., will look at using the cloud for hosting and processing 3D data. Cesium lead Patrick Cozzi is both a member and the moderator of the panel. He’ll be discussing the role of 3D open standards in the...
Starting with Cesium 1.21 on May 2, Sandcastle now integrates with the GitHub API for importing and exporting code examples. There are two new buttons in the Sandcastle toolbar: Share and Import Gist. To share code you’ve written in Sandcastle, just click the Share button and copy the link. When you click Share, the code is POSTed to an anonymous...
We’ve been attending FOSS4G NA since the first year Cesium was developed, and we love it. It’s the conference where we meet our users face-to-face, present the latest Cesium developments, and learn about all the great advances in the field. Every year brings a different emphasis to the sessions, reflecting what’s happening in the world of geospatial software. This year,...
Continuous integration, or CI, is an automated process that occurs whenever a developer commits code to Cesium or opens a pull request. To help guarantee the quality of the code we are writing before it is merged into master, we build and test the code using a continuous integration service called Travis-CI. Travis is a hosted service that checks out...
What is Electron? Electron allows users to build cross-platform desktop applications with web technologies. Since Cesium is built purely on web technologies, developers can build Cesium desktop apps with ease thanks to Electron. Electron provides access to the operating system via Node.js and Electron modules. In this article, we will build a small desktop Cesium app with Electron from the...
We are happy to announce the release of Cesium 1.20. Here are the highlights of the new release: Added infinite horizontal scrolling in 2D. Improved KML NetworkLink and StyleMap support. Added translucent and colored image support to KML ground overlays. For more details and the full list of changes, see the change log. News A lot has been happening in...
This is a guest post by Ryan Walklin about using the Metal renderer with Cesium. - Sarah Cesium is an open-source WebGL-based virtual globe and geospatial visualization library, built with Javascript. It runs extremely well on desktop-class hardware in a browser, but more performance can be gained on mobile by using native languages and APIs. I started porting Cesium to...
Interest in Cesium is growng all over the world. More than 140 people have already registered for a Cesium seminar in Tel Aviv next month. This full-day seminar is about commercial offerings from AGI, the founder of Cesium, and is offered by Synergy Integration, AGI’s partner in Israel. It will cover open streaming formats, Cesium’s processing and streaming servers, and...
Rob Taglang has joined the Cesium team as a six month co-op from Drexel University, where he is a junior pursuing a BS/MS Degree in Computer Engineering. Rob will be working all across Cesium to start, and will improve our content generation pipeline for models and 3D Tiles. He brings his experience of working across a wide range of technologies,...
In 2D maps, drawing tools are used to draw points, polylines, and polygons in a “John Madden” fashion. In 3D, drawing tools are generally used in the same manner - to annotate the globe’s surface. With Cesium’s Scene.pick and Scene.pickPosition functions, we can reenvision drawing tools for 3D to allow users to draw on terrain, draw on any 3D surface...
To all the Pennsylvania geo folks out there: The Cesium team has just released a free, hosted, demonstration terrain service of Pennsylvania. Here is a sample app showing off some of my favorite locations. The beautiful 1-meter resolution terrain source comes from PASDA. This service is ready to support any Pennsylvania-focused app that requires super-fast transmission of high-resolution terrain. You...
The STK World Terrain has incorporated the complete SRTM 30 meter resolution dataset published and managed by USGS, which covers most of the globe between 60 north and 60 south. No need to update your URLs; the data was updated on the servers over the weekend. You can browse the data here, or just simply open up your own favorite...
This week the OGC is meeting at the World Bank building in Washington, D.C., to plan, organize, and forge a path for open standards to help support the ever evolving needs of the growing geospatial community. As part of this, Patrick Cozzi, the founder of Cesium, will be presenting 3D Tiles during the Thursday session to the community. 3D Tiles...
In Cesium we’ve historically been able to create points using billboards with circles, but now we can create millions of points with the faster, less memory-intensive PointPrimitive and PointPrimitiveCollection, introduced back in Cesium 1.10. Here’s a code sample of 64,800 PointPrimitive objects covering the globe, as well as an image of the result. var viewer = new Cesium.Viewer('cesiumContainer'); var points...
The program for FOSS4G NA 2016, coming up in May, is now available. All of the accepted talks look great. We’re especially looking forward to the ones that will be covering Cesium. As you put together your schedule for the conference, be sure to check out these sessions: 3D Tiles: Beyond 2D Tiling, by Sean Lilley, Cesium, and Patrick Cozzi,...
We’re pleased to announce the release of Cesium 1.19. Here are the highlights of the new release: Improved KML support including NetworkLink, NetworkLinkControl, and StyleMap. Added ability to zoom to an ImageryLayer. Added Camera.flyHome function for resetting the camera to the home view. For more details and the full list of changes, see the change log. Other Cesium News Website...
We built the Cesium website using Jekyll, a static site generator. Jekyll allows both technical and non-technical content creators to write blog posts and other pages in Markdown format, which Jekyll converts into an HTML page. Some of the other tools we use are Bootstrap for layouts, Less for styling, and gulp for building the site. Using Travis CI, we...
Our very own Sean Lilley has been selected to do a live informational interview with students via Twitter. The University of Pennsylvania Career Services regularly invites alumni to tweet throughout a typical day of work. No workday at AGI is merely typical, but Sean will be doing his best to capture just how awesome it is to be a 3D...
We’re pleased to announce the release of Cesium 1.18. Here are the highlights of the new release: Reduced the amount of CPU memory used by terrain by ~25% in Chrome. Added a Sandcastle example to “star burst” overlapping billboards and labels. Added VRButton which is a simple, single-button widget that toggles VR mode. Cardboard for mobile is supported. More VR...
Proposals are coming in for FOSS4G NA, and we are excited for the conference. The Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial conference is one of our favorite events of the year! The early bird deadline was January 22 (the final proposal deadline is February 8, so there’s still time to get your idea in), and the proposals look great....
This is a guest post by Mike Macaulay about using the webpack module bundler with Cesium. - Sarah This tutorial will show how you can use the webpack module bundler with Cesium. Some basic knowlege of webpack will be assumed but code samples will be provided for reference. These code samples are located here. There are two ways to use...
This semester I am happy to be working with Richard Lee, a University of Pennsylvania student studying both Digital Media Design and Computer Graphics and Game Technology. Richard is developing open-source glTF pipeline tools for tasks such as optimizing glTF assets, converting to and from binary glTF, and supporting glTF extensions. We’re using Node.js, so the tools will be available...
Tom Pedbereznak has joined the Cesium team as a six month co-op from Northeastern University, where he is a 2nd year student in Computer Science with a concentration in Cyber Operations. Tom will be working all across Cesium, including helping out with 3D Tiles. He is very passionate about streamlining and writing well-documented code and plans to bring these skills...
We are happy to announce the release of Cesium 1.17. Here are the highlights of the new release: Reduced the amount of GPU and CPU memory used by terrain by using compression. The CPU memory was reduced by up to 40%. Added the ability to manipulate Model node transformations via CZML and the Entity API. See the new Sandcastle example:...
Cesium is once again part of the NORAD Tracks Santa team, helping track Santa on his Christmas Eve trip around the globe. You can keep up-to-date on Santa’s current location at www.noradsanta.org. Many of the updates to Cesium over this past year will make the Santa tracking experience better than ever. The screenshots below are based on historical data, as...
In Cesium 1.17, which will be released on January 4, 2016, we have reduced the amount of GPU and CPU memory used by terrain. The overall amount of CPU memory used has been reduced by up to 40%. Once a mesh is created for the quantized mesh or height map terrain data, it is uploaded to the GPU for rendering,...
Over the past year, a lot of people have started using npm for front-end dependency management, so we thought it was time Cesium officially provided it as an option for our community. Starting with 1.16, which was released December 1, we’ve made Cesium available as an npm module. Getting the latest release of Cesium is now as easy as running...
Welcome to the new CesiumJS.org! We’ll be the first to admit that our old website was due for a makeover. We’ve had the same one since Cesium started in 2012, and while it’s served us well over the years, it was time for some major renovations. Along with a new look and feel, the new site features a more responsive...
We are pleased to announce the release of Cesium 1.16. Here are the highlights: Improved terrain performance by up to 35% by adding fog. See the technical post about it at Graphics Tech in Cesium - Fog. Added terrain exaggeration. Added support for incrementally loading a glTF model’s textures. This allows the model to be visible as soon as possible...
We recently added fog to Cesium, which will be in the 1.16 release on December 1. Fog is a graphics technique for fading out distant geometry. Early games introduced fog to hide artifacts of geometry rendered in the distance. Even after it was no longer needed, games continued to support fog because it adds realism to the scene and reduces...
We are pleased to announce the release of Cesium 1.15. Highlights include: Support for glTF 1.0 and the KHR_binary_glTF and KHR_materials_common extensions. Also, updated the online model converter to output glTF 1.0. Decreased GPU memory usage in BillboardCollection and LabelCollection by using WebGL instancing. New CZML examples thanks to Tiff Lu and Adam Cole from the University of Pennsylvania. For...
The FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial) conferences mean a lot to us. We were introduced to the community at FOSS4G NA 2012 in Washington, D.C., just a few months before AGI released Cesium as open-source. The conference played a major role in accelerating this initial release. Since then, we have sponsored and presented at every FOSS4G conference...
We recently added WebGL instancing to Cesium. Instancing is an optimization technique that enables you to render a model multiple times with a single draw call. The definitive use case for Cesium is rendering repeating elements such as trees, vehicles, and satellites in an efficient manner. Since many others have already covered this topic (TojiCode), I’m going to focus on...
This is a guest post by Andrew Simpson of CloudAhoy about their transition from Google Earth to Cesium. For more info on moving from the GE plugin to Cesium, see the tutorial series. - Sarah CloudAhoy is a web application for pilots to debrief their flights. During the flight we capture GPS and other data via the user’s iPhone, iPad,...
The Cesium Fall Code Sprint, an event of intensive, multi-day, collaborative coding and team building, took place October 12-18. We left our usual home at AGI in Exton and rented a house in Lake Harmony in the Pocono Mountains in Eastern Pennsylvania. We got to experience the feeling of autumn in the mountains with its cool days, colorful leaves, and...
The 2015 Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) of Women in Computing was held at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, TX, from Wednesday, October 14, to Friday, October 16. Produced by the Anita Borg Institute (ABI) and presented in partnership with the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), it is the world's largest technical conference for women in computing and...
On October 8 we attended JS.Geo. The conference brought together a community of those interested in visualization, analysis, and cartography using JavaScript technologies at the University City Science Center in Philadelphia. This day-long event spotlighted presentations by 26 speakers in total, both scheduled and improvisational. This was our first time attending a conference and our first exposure to the geospatial...
DigitalGlobe’s high resolution imagery, collected by their own satellites, covers the entire earth, with resolutions as high as 30 cm/pixel in some regions. Recently DigitalGlobe released the Maps API product, making it easy for developers to access DigitalGlobe’s image catalog and to integrate that imagery directly into their own applications. Their announcement includes a demo. We’ve tried out the API...
In creating a staging site for our work on adding CZML examples to Sandcastle, Adam and I have come across some best practices for hosting Sandcastle using GitHub Pages. Hopefully, this information can prove useful to others in the Cesium community. Set up GitHub Pages. GitHub Pages supports user sites hosted at http://username.github.io, or project sites hosted at http://username.github.io/repository, where...
Cesium recently teamed up with Red Bull and Doarama for one of its wildest visualizations yet. The annual Red Bull X-Alps is an intense, multi-day hiking and paragliding race across the Alps. The race course covers about 1,000 km by straight line, though the athletes’ path takes them much farther than that. Fans can follow the race online, seeing the...
This is a guest post by Erik Hellstedt, creator of Geo-Animate, about his transition from Google Earth to Cesium. For more info on moving from the GE plugin to Cesium, see the tutorial series. - Sarah I love maps and I love history. Geo-Animate, a site for tinkering with maps and exploring history, began as a hobby. I started out...
We are pleased to announce the release of Cesium 1.14. Highlights include: Provided a workaround for Safari 9 where WebGL constants can’t be accessed through WebGLRenderingContext. Added a workaround for Chrome 45, where the first character in a label with a small font size would not appear. #3011 Fixed issues causing the terrain and sky to disappear when the camera...
This is a guest post by Melissa Honaker, a Systems Engineer at AGI, who is co-organizing the AGI International Users Conference. - Sarah AGI is holding its first International Users Conference in Singapore 7-8 October 2015, and we’ve dedicated an entire track to Cesium. Come hear from other Cesium users from all over the globe and get a deep dive...
We are happy to have two students from the University of Pennsylvania contributing to Cesium this fall. Tiff Lu and Adam Cole are both in Dr. Chris Murphy’s Open-Source Software Development course, CIS 399. In the course students learn about open source software development while simultaneously working on an existing open source project: in this case, Cesium. As their industry...
Katherina Lim has joined the Cesium team as a six month co-op from Drexel University, where she is a 3rd year computer science student with a minor in interactive digital media. Kat will largely be working behind the scenes, but expect to see some pull requests into Cesium as well. Learn more about Kat at her LinkedIn page.
Gabrielle Getz has joined the Cesium team as a six month co-op from Drexel University, where she is a 4th year computer science student with a minor in digital media. Gabby will be putting both of her specialties to good use as she sets out to redesign the Cesium website. This is actually Gabby’s second Cesium-related job, as she spent...
Cesium is designed to take advantage of GPU hardware. In most cases this means using WebGL to render 3D objects onto the screen. While WebGL is primarily a graphics library, it can be utilized to do more general computing tasks. This concept is called GPGPU, or General-Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units. GPGPU is also known as GPU computing. The...
We are pleased to announce the release of Cesium 1.13. Highlights include: Improved Cesium compatibility on mobile GPUs, such as the Mali-400MP. Support for GroundPrimitive which works much like Primitive but drapes geometry over terrain. Support for z-ordering of GroundPrimitive instances via Scene.groundPrimitives. For more details and the full list of changes, see the change log. Several GroundPrimitives draped over...
Sean Lilley has joined the Cesium team as a 3D software developer. He will improve Cesium’s graphics engine and help create the 3D Tiles spec. Sean graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where we met in my GPU Programming and Architecture course, and later worked together on voxel rendering. While at Penn, Sean interned at Electronic Arts and AMD. His...
AGI's entire Cesium team had the joy of attending SIGGRAPH, the annual computer graphics conference. Our trip kicked off with a night out with many members of the WebGL Community, including folks from Three.js, Sketchfab, Autodesk, NVIDIA, Google, and Khronos. We owe a huge thanks to Eric Haines for co-organizing this. Follow all these awesome people on Twitter. For the...
Sarah Chow has joined the Cesium team as a freelance editor, with special focus on polishing the Cesium Blog and our Demos and Showcases. A graduate of Brigham Young University with an MA in English, Sarah has 5 years of experience in publishing computer graphics books at A K Peters and CRC Press, where she worked as an acquisition editor....
Cesium is the 3D platform for visualizing globes, from every satellite in space to every building in Manhattan to every crater on Mars. To achieve this Digital Earth vision of connecting the world’s geospatial data, we’re excited to introduce our biggest initiative since Cesium itself: 3D Tiles. 3D Tiles are an open specification for streaming massive heterogeneous 3D geospatial datasets....
As part of adding streaming 3D buildings to Cesium, we implemented some interesting view frustum culling optimizations for bounding volume hierarchies (BVHs). In particular, we implemented plane masking as described by Sýkora & Jelínek in Efficient View Frustum Culling (Section 2.5). In this article, we explain the algorithm, including pseudocode, and share performance results. Overview Generally, when frustum culling nodes...
We are pleased to announce the release of Cesium 1.12, featuring a new imagery provider for Mapbox tiles. < > Mapbox Streets and Satellite Imagery on Cesium's World Terrain Highlights include: Added MapboxImageryProvider to load imagery from Mapbox. To use Mapbox imagery, you simply need to provide the MapboxImageryProvider with a mapId and an accessToken. We also added the mapbox.satellite,...
SIGGRAPH is coming up soon so we’re busy planning our schedule. Here’s the WebGL events the Cesium team is looking forward to. Saturday WebGL Drink 8 pm, Hotel Figueroa Join the Cesium team, WebGL Insights contributors, Eric Haines, me, and others to talk WebGL (cash bar). This is not an official SIGGRAPH event, but we promise we will be...
This is a guest post by Yonatan Kra of BIKS Intelligence Solutions originally posted on BIKS Blog. BIKS initiates, designs, and develops complex web applications for big data analytics and information & knowledge extraction. Cesium billboards are an easy way to mark a point on the globe with an image. For example: viewer.entities.add({ position: position, billboard: { image: svgUrl }...
You are invited to the annual Cesium BOF at SIGGRAPH to learn about the latest Cesium development and community news. This is the Cesium event of the year! There will be Cesium swag and WebGL Insights giveaways. Virtual Globes Using WebGL and Cesium Tuesday, August 11, 2015, 10:30 am - 12:00 pm Los Angeles Convention Center Room 512 Introduction and...
We are pleased to announce the release of Cesium 1.11. This is a significant release with camera, terrain, and imagery improvements, and bug fixes. Highlights include: Camera Improved camera flights. Take them for a spin in Sandcastle. The camera now zooms to the point under the mouse cursor, instead of the center of the canvas. Terrain and Imagery Improved terrain...
We’re happy to release a new demo of the upcoming streaming 3D buildings feature in Cesium: Canary Wharf, London. Canary Wharf with CyberCity 3D buildings and MapBox Streets base layer. In addition to the features in the recent Washington, DC and Cambridge demos, the buildings in Canary Wharf are colored by height as shown above. Some choice views include: One...
Cesium 1.11 will include network and rendering performance improvements for terrain and imagery. Previously, Cesium used bounding spheres around terrain tiles for view frustum culling to avoid processing tiles out of view. In Cesium 1.11, we added support for culling tiles using arbitrarily-oriented bounding boxes. For a quick comparison, this GIF shows both types of bounding volumes for a tile...
On Monday, we released a demo of the City of Cambridge with 20,000 buildings. Today, we're excited to release a demo of Washington, DC with 135,000 structures: Dupont Circle. This demo uses several datasets: Over 135,000 measurement-quality structures with rooftops from CyberCity 3D. Zoning, traffic cameras, and metro lines open-data layers from DC.Gov. Base layer map with roads and labels...
In April, we announced plans for 3D buildings in Cesium. Today, we're happy to share a demo of the City of Cambridge: Harvard Yard in Cesium. This demo uses several datasets: Over 20,000 measurement-quality buildings with rooftops from CyberCity 3D. Zoning, trees, and catch basin layers from the Cambridge GIS department. Base layer map with roads and labels from Bing...
This is a guest post by Aditya Raisinghani. He is a student working with the Cesium team remotely from India as part of Google Summer of Code 2015. -Mike LP Hi everyone, My name is Aditya Raisinghani and I’m a Computer Science undergrad at BITS Pilani, India. This summer I’ll be working with the Cesium community to refactor the Cesium...
We are pleased to announce the release of Cesium 1.10. Highlights include: Added view query parameter to the CesiumViewer app, which sets the initial camera position using longitude, latitude, height, heading, pitch and roll. For example: http://cesiumjs.org/Cesium/Build/Apps/CesiumViewer/index.html?view=-75.0,40.0,300.0,9.0,-13.0,3.0 Added Billboard.heightReference and Label.heightReference to clamp billboards and labels to terrain. Added support for the CESIUM_binary_glTF extension for loading binary blobs of glTF...
Update: This initial work on Binary glTF has led to the KHR_binary_glTF extension, which should be used instead of CESIUM_binary_glTF. Starting with Cesium 1.10, the new Binary glTF extension makes 3D models 10-30% faster to load, especially models with a lot of geometry. To use it, select the Binary glTF option in the Cesium model converter, which will return a...
I’d like to once again welcome Ayush Khandelwal to the Cesium community for Google Summer of Code 2015! Ayush will be implementing support for the Geography Markup Language (GML) Simple Features Profile (SFP) in Cesium. GML SFP is a common way of representing geospatial vector features like points, lines, and polygons, plus accompanying metadata. In addition to being useful in...
Aditya Raisinghani is completing his final year at Birla Institute of Technology & Science Pilani, India where he has majored in Computer Science. He’s shown strong interest in geospatial applications and has actively sought out experience with a wide breadth of web technologies. Aditya’s project for the summer is to build a new Sandcastle web application. The key features being:...
This is a guest post by Mike McGann, lead developer for NASA Worldview. - Mike LP Abhishek Potnis is a graduate student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and is focusing his research efforts on ray tracing based optical canopy reflectance modeling and visualization using high performance computing. He is also a passionate web developer, a member of the...
We are happy to once again have André Nunes joining the Cesium team as part of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2015. If you’ve been a long time Cesium user, you may remember André from his participation in GSoC 2013, where he did an awesome job working on initial KML support. Building on his previous experience, Andre will tackle native...
Kai Ninomiya has joined the Cesium team at AGI for the summer. Kai is a computer science and computer graphics student at the University of Pennsylvania, where he developed a massively parallel path tracer in CUDA and a mesh fracturing algorithm in WebCL. Last summer, Kai worked on VMWare’s OpenGL implementation. In his spare time, he writes ray tracers in...
Cesium resembles a general graphics engine, but as we move up the layers of abstraction in Cesium, classes become more specific to Cesium’s problem domain: virtual globes. Here, we tour the full low-level Cesium graphics stack and make comparisons to graphics and game engines. As described before, the lowest level of the stack is the Renderer, which is a WebGL...
A common practice in computer graphics is to pack and compress vertex attributes. It reduces the memory footprint, time to transfer data across the bus from the CPU to the GPU, and GPU memory bandwidth at the cost of extra instructions in the vertex shader. Another benefit may be that there are more attributes than the maximum number of vertex...
Cesium is built on a custom WebGL engine - the Renderer - that we started developing in March 2011 when the WebGL 1.0 spec was released. I consider this a 4th generation renderer because it is based on my experience developing the OpenGlobe Renderer, which Kevin Ring and I used in our virtual globe book [Cozzi11]. That, in turn, was...
This article traces through Cesium’s Scene.render to explain how Cesium 1.9 renders a frame using its WebGL renderer. Put a breakpoint in Scene.render, run a Cesium app, and follow along. Given Cesium’s focus on visualizing geospatial content, scenes with many different light sources are not common so Cesium uses a traditional forward-shading pipeline. Cesium’s pipeline is unique because it uses...
As many of you know, Cesium has supported KML since Version 1.7. It’s been a great success and we’ve been hearing more and more that developers are migrating to Cesium so they can retire their Google Earth applications. To assist in this process, we added some KML examples to our Cesium for Google Earth Developers website. There are now over...
Hi Everyone, I’m Michael Lodge-Paolini, aka Mike LP and last week I joined Cesium’s core team at AGI as Developer Relations. What that means for all of you is that you now have a point person on Cesium’s core team whose primary responsibility is to get to know you and understand how you use Cesium. I’m going to be active...
We are pleased to announce the release of Cesium 1.9. This is mostly a bug fix release on the way to what is shaping up to be a significant 1.10 release. Highlights include: Entity material properties and Material uniform values can now take a canvas element in addition to an image or url. #2667 Fixed a bug which caused Entity.viewFrom...
We are pleased to announce that the Cesium Community will mentor four Google Summer of Code projects. These projects will contribute to core Cesium as well as the ecosystem of examples and demos. Congratulations to the students and mentors! We look forward to your contributions. The projects are: NASA’s Data Curtains from Space Student: Abhishek Potnis, Indian Institute of Technology...
This summer, we are rolling out 3D buildings in Cesium with data provided to the Cesium community by CyberCity 3D. This includes 130 km^2 of measurement-quality building geometry with rooftops. In addition, some buildings will be textured. For a preview, check out Seattle in Cesium: Click on individual buildings and zones to see related fields. Turn on and off the...
In geospatial apps, quadtrees are widely used for streaming imagery, terrain, vectors, and other data. Here’s a cheatsheet for some common operations for a complete quadtree (all leaf tiles are at the same level). We use the term tile, instead of node, since tile is popular in the geospatial world, and use the term level to define the zero-based depth/scale/zoom-level/z...
We are pleased to announce the release of Cesium 1.8. Highlights include: Added a new Sandcastle demo, Interpolation, which illustrates time-dynamic position interpolation options and uses the new VelocityOrientationProperty to orient an aircraft in flight. Added support for the KML visibility element. Added Entity.show, a boolean for hiding or showing an entity and its children. Deprecated the smallterrain tileset. It...
This is a guest post by Christopher Clark, creator of EclipseTracks.org, who describes the app and its CZML toolchain. - Patrick This Friday the only total solar eclipse of 2015 will cut between the U.K and Iceland on its way to the north pole. Solar eclipses occur about once every 18 months but their planet-wide nature means any one place...
We are pleased to announce that Cesium version 1.7.1 is now available for download. This is a patch release that addresses a few specific issues found in 1.7. Below is the complete set of changes. Fixed a crash in InfoBox that would occur when attempting to display plain text. Fixed a crash when loading KML features that have no description...
We are pleased to announce that Cesium version 1.7 is now available for download. Here are just a few of the highlights from the release: Added initial support for KML 2.2 via KmlDataSource. Check out the new Sandcastle Demo and the reference documentation for more details. Added support for rendering a water effect on Quantized-Mesh terrain tiles. Added camera-terrain collision...
The Cesium API supports several streaming terrain providers, enabling global 3D terrain visualization in just a few simple lines of code. Two of Cesium’s publicly available terrain tilesets, the STK World Terrain and smallterrain, are produced and maintained by Analytical Graphics Inc (AGI), the founders and core maintainers of Cesium. Previously, we could use the smallterrain tileset for water effects,...
This is a guest post by Andrew Hill, Chief Science Officer at CartoDB. - Patrick Putting beautiful and dynamic maps onto a 3D globe has never been easier. Using a little JavaScript, you can now put your favorite CartoDB visualization on a 3D globe. The awesome open source JavaScript API Cesium, authored by AGI, renders 3D maps in the browser...
NCGIS is the largest state GIS conference in the US. We were happy to be invited to speak about Cesium. Join us next Thursday, February 26, in Raleigh, NC for our talk: The Rise of 3D GIS on the Web by Patrick Cozzi Abstract: With the introduction of WebGL and the wide availability of fast GPUs on desktop and mobile,...
We’ve moved the content of this tutorial to the new documentation section of the site, here.
We’ve moved the content of this tutorial to the new documentation section of the site, here.
Patrick Cozzi and I will be at the FOSS4G North America 2015 conference in San Francisco from March 8th to the 12th to talk about Cesium. There are two Cesium-related talks this year. Both take place on Web Mapping Day, Thursday, March 12, and are back-to-back in the same room, Regency B, making it easy to attend both. * 1:45pm...
This is a guest post by Dennis Wegewijs, creator of Cycling the Alps, who shares his experience moving from the Google Earth plugin to Cesium. - Patrick With Cycling the Alps, you can explore the routes of all cycling climbs in the Alps mountain range with many different visual features. One of these features was a Google Earth fly over...
We’ve moved the content of this tutorial to the new documentation section of the site, here.
We are pleased to announce that Cesium version 1.6 is now available for download. This is our largest release since 1.0. Here are just a few of the many highlights: Fixed an issue with order independent translucency that caused flickering and rendering artifacts on many video cards, particularly Intel GPUs. If you were previously disabling order independent translucency, it should...
This is a guest post by Greg Angevine, Founder of Cube Cities Inc.. His company has used the Google Earth plugin for years and has recently built impressive work with Cesium (like this). - Patrick Web developers who are evaluating alternatives to the Google Earth API should look to Cesium for ease of use, impressive visualization capability and broad compatibility...
Given all the excitement around Cesium, AGI has multiple technical openings on the Cesium team. I wanted to give some insight into the interview process. Code Portfolio We don't believe in brainteasers or traditional behavioral interviews. We believe in code. We'll want to see your code portfolio, e.g., perhaps your GitHub profile, before the interview that shows off all the...
Cesium version 1.5 is now available for download. Highlights include: Improved GeoJSON, TopoJSON, and general polygon loading performance. Added caching to Model to save memory and improve loading speed when several models with the same url are created. Thanks to Sergio Flores from Inovaworks for his support. Improved the quality of font outlines. Model caching. For a full list of...
This is a guest post by Branden Coker, an artist from AGI with many things to his credit, including the glTF model for NORAD Tracks Santa. Special thanks to 3dben for Blender and 3DS Max tips. - Patrick Cesium uses the web-friendly glTF format for 3D models. Cesium provides an online COLLADA-to-glTF converter that allows us to drag and drop...
This is a guest post by Chris Cooper, from NICTA, of Doarama fame. - Patrick A number of Doarama users have expressed interest in augmenting the Cesium WebGL Virtual Globe with custom meshes. For example this might include a 3D model generated from photos captured by a drone. It is now relatively straightforward to capture 3D objects from the real...
Performance is important. Here's our bag of WebGL profiling tips. First, always keep your browser and video-card drivers up-to-date (NVIDIA • AMD). FPS Counters In Chrome, to show an FPS counter, browse to chrome://flags/, check FPS counter, and relaunch. In Firefox, browse to about:config and enable layers.acceleration.draw-fps. (Alternatively, in Cesium, add the stats=true query parameter, e.g., http://cesiumjs.org/Cesium/Build/Apps/CesiumViewer/?stats=true). Running above 60...
We are pleased to announce that Cesium version 1.4 is now available for download. Some highlights of this release include: Added support for touch events on Internet Explorer 11 using the Pointer Events API. Added geometry outline width support to the DataSource layer. Improved GeoJSON loading performance. Improved point visualization performance for all DataSources. Other recent news and postings: Patrick...
When we first started developing Cesium at AGI, we learned that many Cesium developers were already using OpenLayers. For example, over two years ago, Raytheon developed an OpenLayers 2 adapter for Cesium to aid in adding Cesium to Vega. Likewise, the OpenLayers developers saw significant interest in 3D and Cesium in particular so a goal of OpenLayers 3 was to...
This week, we are hitting the road and heading to one of our favorite cities, Boston. We're visiting the graphics labs at MIT and Harvard, the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard, and our friends at Heuristic Labs. We'll post slides for our talks when we are back in town. In the meantime, here are the abstracts. Update: the slides...
This is a guest post by Rich Kadel of Harmonia Holdings Group, LLC describing Cesium-GWT. -jep Maps are an important tool in the toolbox, and Cesium provides the best combination of cross platform compatibility, end-user accessibility (via web delivery), and powerful feature capabilities compared with the plug-in-based alternatives such as Google Earth or NASA WorldWind. JavaScript has evolved into a...
We are pleased to announce that Cesium version 1.3 is now available for download. While this is mostly a bugfix release, there were some minor enhancements: Added support to the CesiumTerrainProvider for terrain tiles with more than 64K vertices, which is common for sub-meter terrain. Added Primitive.compressVertices. When true (default), geometry vertices are compressed to save GPU memory. Reduced the...
Cesium is growing fast. The forum is increasingly busy. Lots of folks are presenting about Cesium at conferences (besides us!). Developers are building Cesium apps in industries that we didn't even realize would benefit from Cesium. Just about every day, I personally get an email from someone new moving to Cesium. AGI, the company who started Cesium, is excited by...
This is a guest post by André Santos on his experience porting the awesome youbeQ app from the Google Earth Plugin to Cesium. For more info on moving from the GE plugin to Cesium, see the tutorial series. - Patrick youbeQ first appeared at the end of 2011, we wanted to build a 3D platform where people could explore the...
We updated this tutorial and moved it here.
Analytical Graphics, Inc (AGI) is proud to announce that the public STK World Terrain dataset has been updated! This significant update follows the release of the STK Terrain Server v1.0 and includes a number of new features and terrain improvements. You may have noticed back in Cesium 1.0 that we added extensions to the Quantized-Mesh 1.0 format and provided implementation...
We are pleased to announce that Cesium version 1.2 is now available for download. Highlights of the 1.2 release include: Added support for the GeoJSON simplestyle specification. (Sandcastle example) Added GeoJsonDataSource.fromUrl to make it easy to add a data source in less code. Added PinBuilder class for easy creation of map pins. (Sandcastle example) Added Color.brighten and Color.darken to make...
Josh Poley and I will be at the FOSS4G conference next week to talk about Cesium as part of the ecosystem of open-source geospatial software. AGI was awesome to sponsor the conference so we have a booth in the Exhibition Hall with Cesium demos and new Cesium giveaways! Here's the full Cesium-related schedule: Tuesday, September 9. 2:45-3:15 PM: I'm giving...
We are pleased to announce that Cesium version 1.1 is now available for download. Highlights of the 1.1 release include: Support for WMTS imagery via WebMapTileServiceImageryProvider. Thanks goes out to Gilles Cébélieu for his first contribution. Added an optional pickFeatures function to the ImageryProvider interface. With supporting imagery providers, such as WebMapServiceImageryProvider, it can be used to determine the rasterized...
SIGGRAPH 2014 is shaping up to be a great conference for WebGL developers. Here are the highlights. Sunday ACM SIGGRAPH Cartographic Visualization BOF 12:30-2 PM, East Building Room 8 This BOF is organized by Theresa-Marie Rhyne, who will give a talk on applying color theory to geographic visualization. On the WebGL front, Alex Wood is giving a talk on our...
I am pleased to announce that Cesium version 1.0 is now available for download. For those readers who may be new to Cesium, Cesium is a JavaScript library for creating 3D globes and 2D maps in a web browser, using WebGL for hardware-accelerated graphics, and is cross-platform, cross-browser, and requires no browser plugin. For more information about Cesium, see our...
As we get close to Cesium 1.0, let's take a quick tour of the 3+ year journey that brought us here. March 2011 - WebGL 1.0: At the Game Developers Conference, Khronos released the WebGL 1.0 spec. This brought plugin-free hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to modern web browsers, making Cesium possible. March 2011 - First commit: Cesium was started by Analytical...
Developers from the Cesium team are heading to the SIGGRAPH conference again this year. On Tuesday, August 12, we are hosting the “Virtual Globes Using WebGL and Cesium” BOF (informal meeting) from 11am-12pm at the Vancouver Convention Centre, East Building, Room 9. This will have a brief introduction to Cesium, the latest news, awesome demos from AGI, NICTA, and Camptocamp,...
Cesium version b30 is now available for download. Highlights include: Support for Internet Explorer 11.0.9 on desktops. For the best results, use the new IE Developer Channel for development. Improved support for CZML reference properties to reduce file size by better sharing data among objects. In extreme cases, we’ve seen CZML files shrink by 80%. See below for an example....
Cesium version b29 is now available for download. This release is primarily a bugfix release, as well as breaking changes as we work towards stabilizing the API for a 1.0 release. In particular: Improved Internet Explorer 11.0.8 support including workarounds for rendering labels, billboards, and the sun. Many low-level Renderer types have been removed from the public Cesium API. They...
Cesium version b28 is now available for download. Highlights include: Terrain selection in the BaseLayerPicker widget. The new NavigationHelpButton widget with instructions for navigating the globe. The new Model.minimumPixelSize property so models can remain visible when the viewer zooms out. Terrain selection. Navigation instructions. Models can remain visible when zoomed out. For a full list of changes, see the change...
I’m pleased to formally announce a new terrain tileset for use with Cesium and other applications: STK World Terrain! STK World Terrain is a seamless mosaic built from a large and growing set of terrain data. It currently includes 10 meter resolution data for the United States, 30 meter data for Europe and Australia (both added just this week!), and...
Cesium version b27 is now available for download. This version includes order-independent transparency (OIT), a new technique that improves the visual quality of overlapping translucent geometry to make it more clear what is in front. Extruded country boundaries and sensors in b26 (before OIT). Using OIT in b27. Note the differences in the blue sensor on the right near the...
A feature soon to be in Cesium is order independent transparency for improved visual quality of transparent geometry. Previously, we used alpha-blending for transparency. The color of transparent geometry is blended with the background. When drawing more than one transparent object, the geometry needed to be sorted back-to-front to correctly blend the geometry color with the background color. Now we...
Cesium version b26 is now available for download. This is our biggest release in quite some time and includes 4 major new features: Added Model primitive for drawing 3D models using glTF. See the tutorial and Sandcastle example. Model support will continue to evolve as the glTF specification is finalized. See the Models roadmap for more details. DynamicScene now makes...
We’ve moved the content of this tutorial to the new documentation section of the site, here.
Cesium version b25 is now available for download. This release includes several minor improvements and fixes as we ramp up for a big b26 release. For a full list of changes, see the change log. This past month, we also started plugins, which are libraries that add functionality to Cesium. In addition to a few starter plugins from Analytical Graphics,...
Today we are rolling out Cesium plugins, which are libraries that integrate with Cesium and add functionality. The initial set of plugins include cesium-leap, by Aviture, which adds navigation using the Leap Motion Controller. Plugins have several benefits: Plugins keep core Cesium as lean as possible, e.g., by avoiding large third-party dependencies in Cesium for non-essential features. An ecosystem of...
Spherical linear interpolation, or SLERP, is widely used in computer graphis to interpolate between rotations represented as quaternions. In Cesium, we use it for camera flights and model animations like the dancing reindeer in NORAD Tracks Santa. When there are many animations in a frame, SLERP often shows up on the profiler. It’s not the top bottleneck, but it’s something...
Cesium version b24 is now available for download. Highlights for this release include: The minified, combined Cesium.js file now omits certain DeveloperError checks, to increase performance and reduce file size. When developing your application, we recommend using the unminified version locally for early error detection, then deploying the minified version to production. Added translateEventTypes, zoomEventTypes, rotateEventTypes, tiltEventTypes, and lookEventTypes properties...
Once again, NORAD's santa tracker is built on our WebGL-based Cesium engine. This year, we added an animated 3D model for Santa and his sled and reindeer using glTF, an emerging open-standard runtime asset format. This article describes the content pipeline and runtime optimizations that will bring the model from artist tools to literally millions of web browsers. The art...
Cesium version b23 is now available for download. Highlights for this release include: Added perPositionHeight option to PolygonGeometry and PolygonOutlineGeometry. Added QuaternionSpline and LinearSpline. Added ObjectOrientedBoundingBox. Renamed our main website from cesium.agi.com to cesiumjs.org. For a full list of changes, see the change log.
We started the Cesium blog a year ago as a way to publish Cesium news like releases and conference trip-reports, and tech content like tutorials and implementation details. This birthday post compiles the most prominent articles of the past year. Tech Articles Robust Polyline Rendering with WebGL Drawing polylines with nicely connected line segments and custom shading and width is...
We’ve moved the content of this tutorial to the new documentation section of the site, here.
Cesium version b22 is now available for download. Highlights for this release include: Added a Geocoder widget to Cesium Viewer and applications that use the Viewer widget. With this new widget, users can type an address or the name of a landmark and Cesium will zoom to that location. New Geocoder widget. Added a GoogleEarthImageryProvider for accessing imagery on a...
A couple weekends ago, a few of us from Analytical Graphics Inc (AGI) took a trip into Center City Philadelphia to participate in the Apps4Philly Civic Hackathon. The Apps4Philly event brought public transportation, civic data enthusiasts and developers together to prototype new applications for Philly’s open-data initiative. There is a great open-data movement in Philadelphia, but there is not a...
All of our code in Cesium is reviewed before being merged into master. Since Cesium is on GitHub, we, of course, use pull requests for code reviews and merging. Other than unit tests and having contributors that strive to be craftsmen, code reviews are the biggest reason for our code quality. We have experimented with the granularity of pull requests...
Cesium version b21 is now available for download. New geometry examples in Sandcastle. Highlights for this release include: Added BingMapsApi.defaultKey. If you use Bing Maps, please replace Cesium’s default key with a key obtained from www.bingmapsportal.com. See this post on the forum for more information. Added several simple geometry examples to Sandcastle for easy copy and paste. Added CorridorOutlineGeometry and...
In previous posts I’ve mentioned that aerospace is a part of my day job. Recently, me and Patrick Cozzi were asked to put together a Cesium demo showcasing the Cygnus spacecraft’s mission to the International Space Station. Here’s a screen shot, but you might as well just run the demo. From a technical standpoint, this demo shows off two in-development...
Cesium version b20 is now available for download. Scaling satellite billboards based on distance from camera. Highlights for this release include: Added Billboard.scaleByDistance and NearFarScalar to control Billboard minimum/maximum scale based on Camera distance to Billboard. Refactored the DynamicScene property system to improve the API. #1080 Improved geometry batching performance by moving work to a web worker. Added an outline...
Last month, we posted that Cesium was one of 23 organizations accepted to particpate in the European Space Agency’s 2013 Summer of Code in Space program. Since then, we received a variety of strong applications from eager students, but were only allowed to choose one. Today, we are happy to announce we have selected to work with Ognjen Bubalo over...
Several Cesium contributors and users were at SIGGRAPH. Here’s the highlights. Virtual Globes Using WebGL and Cesium BOF SIGGRAPH provides rooms for informal meetings called Birds of a Feather or a BOF. This year we started a new Cesium BOF. About 30 folks attended, which is quite good considering it is new and pretty niche. Checkout the slides. Alex Wood...
Cesium version b19 is now available for download. The Geometry and Appearances demo in Sandcastle Highlights for this release include: Added Geometry and Appearances #911. Added a number of new geometry and primitive types related to the above. Added debugging aids for low-level rendering: DrawCommand.debugShowBoundingVolume and Scene.debugCommandFilter. Added Credit and CreditDisplay for displaying credits on the screen. Improved performance and...
Cesium was accepted to Summer of Code in Space 2013 - a program run by the European Space Agency that offers eligible students stipends over the summer to write code for space-related open source projects. We see this as a great way to grow the Cesium community and help students gain experience and make an impact. Students interested in working...
SIGGRAPH is July 21-25. We are presenting Cesium in four sessions and going under-the-hood in a course. If you are attending, stop by and say hi. Here’s the full Cesium schedule. Tuesday, July 23 Virtual Globes Using WebGL and Cesium BOF 11am-12pm, Room 203 B This BOF (Birds of a Feather) is an informal meeting about Cesium. Come meet the...
Cesium version b18 is now available for download. A TopoJSON file of all United States counties loaded inside of the new Viewer widget. Highlights for this release include: Improved overall performance of streaming imagery. Added initial support for GeoJSON and TopoJSON. (#890, #906) CesiumViewerWidget has been replaced with a new Viewer widget with mixin architecture. This new widget does not...
MapBox creates really attractive maps. To see their maps in a new compelling way, we put together a quick web app with Cesium to view MapBox maps on our 3D globe with global terrain and water, and the sun, sky, and stars. Check it out in a modern web browser: Once you’re running, click the MapBox icon in the upper...
Cesium version b17 is now available for download. A CZML defined sun vector. Highlights for this release include: Added sun visualization. Added support for CZML defined vectors. Added support for OES_vertex_array_object, which improves rendering performance. Improved horizon culling for terrain rendering. See the blog post for more details. Added a new HomeButton widget for returning to the default view of...
The slides for our FOSS4G NA talk, Cesium: 3D Maps on the Web, are now online. Here is the pdf. We had a packed house with a lot of folks standing. The slides also contain my notes so they are pretty detailed. In addition to introducing Cesium to the open-source geospatial community, the last part discusses our development tools and...
As previously mentioned, Cesium joins 177 open source projects in participating in Google Summer of Code this year. Since this is our first year in the program, we weren’t sure what to expect, but we were excited to receive many excellent proposals from over 40 students around the world, making it very difficult to narrow down to the two project...
YouTube is littered with first person helmet camera videos of every kind. In fact a quick search turned up approximately 800,000 videos. They’re great at showing some high-intensity action up close and personal. The problem with helmet cam videos is that they lack the ability to convey any information about the bigger picture. Where exactly was the mountain that the...
Are you sick of horizon culling yet? Great, me neither! Last time, we explained what horizon culling is all about, and showed a very efficient way to test a point for occlusion by an ellipsoid. The objects we want to test for occlusion are rarely simple points, however. In particular, we’d like to be able to test terrain tiles for...
Cesium version b16 is now available for download. Polylines with materials. Highlights for this release include: Added wide polylines that support materials. Added Grid, PolylineOutline, PolylineGlow, PolylineArrow, and Fade materials. Added Simon1994PlanetaryPosition which more accurately computes the position of the sun and moon. Improved rendering performance by minimizing WebGL state calls. This is the first release where the minified and...
In developing virtual globes like Cesium, we need to be able to quickly determine when objects in the scene, like terrain tiles, satellites, buildings, vehicles, etc. are invisible and therefore do not need to be rendered. We do view-frustum culling, of course. But another important type of culling is horizon culling. In the figure above, the green points are visible...
This weekend, several of the core Cesium developers attended the 2013 NASA International Space Apps Challenge in Philadelphia, which was the main stage location for the global event. We joined over 9,000 participants around the world in a weekend hackathon to build open-source solutions to space-oriented challenges. Since Cesium is open-source, it was a perfect opportunity to find a challenge...
Rendering with Line Primitives We ran into a few problems when using line primitives (LINES, LINE_STRIP, or LINE_LOOP) to render lines. First, the maximum line width when using ANGLE is 1.0. Second, drawing line primitives with lineWidth (without ANGLE) does not join line segments at a shared vertex: The image below shows lines with the two joins mitered: Finally, our...
We’ve moved the content of this tutorial to the new documentation section of the site, here.
Cesium was accepted to Google Summer of Code 2013 - a program run by Google that offers students stipends over the summer to write code for an open-source project. We see this as a great way to grow the Cesium community and help students get experience and make an impact. We have an ideas page with about ten potential projects....
Our talk on Cesium was accepted to the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial North America 2013 conference, FOSS4G NA 2013. Here’s the abstract: Cesium: 3D Maps on the Web With WebGL, it is now possible to have hardware-accelerated 3D maps in a web browser without a plugin. In this talk, we present Cesium, an open-source JavaScript library for...
Cesium version b15 is now available for download. Highlights for this release include: A new function, sampleTerrain, which returns terrain heights for a provided list of Cartographic positions. Handling of the new CZML delete property and a corresponding DynamicObjectCollection.removeObject function. Three new widgets written purely in CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. Unlike some of our past widgets, they don’t require Dojo...
Cesium version b14 is now available for download. Terrain rendering and the new animation widget at the bottom. Highlights for this release include: Added support for global terrain visualization using terrain data from multiple sources. When using the CesiumTerrainProvider, the oceans are also rendered with a fancy animated wave effect. See the Terrain and Water Tutorial for more information. Added...
We’ve moved the content of this tutorial to the new documentation section of the site, here.
We’ve moved the content of this tutorial to the new documentation section of the site, here.
Outer Space is a large part of my day job, so when I heard that asteroid 2012 DA14 was heading for a fly-by of Earth on February 15th, it seemed like the perfect opportunity for a Cesium demo. I think it turned out rather well. One particularly cool aspect of the asteroid passage is how it looks in Columbus View,...
Cesium version b13 is now available for download. An orbit in ICRF and ellipsoids with rim lighting. Highlights for this release include: CZML and Cesium API support for the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF), which is useful for drawing satellite orbits and other objects in space. Improvements for Cesium on Android. See the Mobile Compatibility Page. Ability to dynamically change...
Cesium version b12a has been released and is available for download. We’re releasing this version outside of our normal monthly cycle to address several issues that arose after we shipped b12: Firefox 18 doesn’t properly transfer typed arrays to or from Web Workers. The default Bing Maps API key included in Cesium expired. Other highlights of the release: Colors can...
We’ve moved the content of this tutorial to the new documentation section of the site, here.
Cesium version b12 has been released and is available for download. Some highlights of the release: Added pinch-zoom, pinch-twist, and pinch-tilt for touch-enabled browsers (particularly mobile browsers). Improved rendering support on Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 using Firefox. Improved camera flights. Added Sandbox example using NASA’s new Black Marble night imagery. Added JulianDate.toIso8601, which creates an ISO8601 compliant representation of...
Yesterday, NASA Earth Observatory released a new, high-resolution view of the Earth at night, dubbed the Black Marble. It was straightforward to turn the approximately 400 megabyte image file into a pyramid of image tiles and display it on an interactive, 3D, Cesium globe. Here’s the end result: NASA Black Marble in Cesium You’ll need a WebGL-capable browser such as...
Cesium version b11 has been released and is available for download. Stars and sky Some highlights of the release: Chris Cooper from NICTA contributed Tile Map Service (TMS) support, see the Imagery Layers Sandcastle example. Improved lighting in Columbus view and on polygons, ellipsoids, and sensors. Fixed atmosphere rendering artifacts and improved Columbus view transition. Fixed jitter artifacts with billboards...
As part of the NORAD Tracks Santa team, Analytical Graphics, Inc. is using Cesium to build a 3D web map for visualizing Santa’s location on December 24th as he makes his way around the globe. See it in action on Christmas Eve at www.noradsanta.org. In this post, I’ll share the tech behind the 3D web map. The locations used in...
Cesium is the largest open-source project that I’ve contributed to in a substantial way. This is probably true for all of the current contributors. Many of us have worked together for years - developing APIs and even 3D APIs at that - but Cesium is our first take at a serious open source project. Here I’ll share many of our...
As part of the new website, we are rolling out this technical blog on Cesium. The most important word there is technical - this is a blog for developers. We will post about best practices for using Cesium and CZML, Cesium implementation details, WebGL, JavaScript, development practices, etc. This will replace the cesium-announce Google group with more frequent and deeper...
