Cesium Native API for Loading and Streaming 3D Tiles and glTF Terrains

The MAK ONE products are terrain-agile – able to load, import, or stream terrain using a wide variety of formats, techniques, and approaches. One of the terrain formats that has recently gained in popularity is the combination of 3D Tiles and glTF. The 3D Tiles meta format, pioneered by Cesium, supports the efficient streaming of worldwide, geo-referenced tiled data from a terrain server in any payload format. 3D Tiles datasets often use the glTF annotated polygonal mesh format to represent the geometry of each tile. The US Army’s STE program, for example, uses this combination of formats as the core of its OneWorldTerrain database, and the format became particularly newsworthy in 2023 when Google made their worldwide buildings dataset available as Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles.

VR-Vantage uses the Cesium Native API from Cesium to load and stream 3D Tiles and glTF datasets – whether the dataset is stored locally on disk, streamed from MAK’s own VR-TheWorld Server, from Cesium’s “Cesium ion” server, or from third-party web-based data services.