Cesium has announced its collaboration with Epic Games, Microsoft, and NVIDIA to demonstrate the future of modelling, simulation, and training with a proof-of-concept demo for v/IITSEC.
“Project Anywhere,” available in Epic’s virtual booth at vIITSEC from December 1st, offers the first glimpse of Cesium’s high-fidelity, full-scale WGS84 globe being streamed into Unreal Engine as 3D Tiles. The collaboration provides the toolchain to utilize real-world 3D location data in synthetic environments.
This marks the first time a full-scale, high-precision 3D globe is plugged into a leading game engine, opening a world of possibilities for Unreal’s users. This will help advance training & simulation, architecture, games, AR/VR, autonomous driving, and other industries by enabling 3D Tiles to be streamed into Unreal for accurate visualization of real-world locations captured by satellites and drones—using the same 3D geospatial knowledge that has gone into CesiumJS for nearly a decade.
“As the leading platform for 3D geospatial, Cesium is proud to be among the pioneers driving the geospatial-enablement of game engines like Unreal,” said Cesium CEO Patrick Cozzi. “The combination of Unreal Engine’s stunning visual quality with Cesium’s ability to stream real-world data captured by satellites and drones will drive new innovations in MS&T and beyond.”
Cesium is already committed to DOD-wide efforts to replicate the operational environment such as Army One World Terrain. Enabling game engines to stream geospecific 3D data as 3D Tiles is yet another key step in reaching never-before-seen levels of accuracy, interactivity, and visual quality for simulations and training.
“Project Anywhere” takes you anywhere in the world on a high-resolution virtual globe. The demo combines Cesium’s geospatial technology, global 3D terrain, and data streaming as 3D Tiles to Unreal Engine. Running on Microsoft Azure with NVIDIA GPUs, “Project Anywhere” brings the digital twin of the real world to the web. Explore the high resolution photogrammetry of Melbourne, fly to your city to find global high-res terrain and 3D building data, or track flights as they take off and land at an airport near you.
“Instead of just talking about trends and buzzwords, we created Project Anywhere with Cesium, Microsoft, and Nvidia to demonstrate readiness and the convergence between these platforms in a tangible way, ” said Sébastien Lozé, Simulations Industry Manager at Epic Games. “Project Anywhere is an illustration of simulation at the point of need—a synthetic environment implementation example to spark new ideas.”
Cesium for Unreal will have a default connection to the Cesium ion SaaS platform for ready-to-use 3D Tiles of terrain and 3D buildings, and best in class content pipelines for generating efficient 3D Tiles from source data such as terrain, imagery, and photogrammetry models. It will be able to stream 3D Tiles over on-premises private networks with Cesium ion. Cesium for Unreal will also be open-source and available for free on the Unreal Marketplace.
