CesiumJS

Underground, TypeScript, and Global 3D Buildings Released in CesiumJS 1.70

Cesium Chinese Website: http://cesiumcn.org/ | China Fast Access: http://cesium.coinidea.com/

On June 1, 2020, CesiumJS released version 1.70, bringing 3 major updates.

Cesium OSM Buildings

Cesium OSM Buildings is a global 3D building layer covering the entire world, built using OpenStreetMap data. It’s available as a 3D Tileset for all Cesium ion users and comes with rich feature data such as building names, addresses, opening hours, and more.

New York City, Seattle, Washington D.C., and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai shown in Cesium OSM Buildings.

Read more about this new global layer and how to use it in your applications.

Underground Support

Cesium now has better support for visualizing underground scenes, from large geological layers underground to mines, caves, and utilities. CesiumJS 1.70 adds the ability to make the globe translucent, enabling data visualization underground and allowing the camera to freely move below the surface.

Making the ground translucent to see underground objects. Explore this example in Sandcastle (https://sandcastle.cesium.com/index.html?src=Globe Translucency.html). This is a Parc lead mine in North Wales by Dr. Edward Allen Sherlock Hart.

These CesiumJS improvements are part of a collaboration with friends at Camptocamp. Their work supports the Swiss Federal Office of Topography (swisstopo), which is using Cesium to create an interactive 3D map of the country.

Camptocamp is using these new underground features in swissgeol, a 3D web-based geological data viewer. Its goal is to visualize many different datasets in a single scene, such as boreholes, seismic data, and the ability to view ground cross-sections. Camptocamp said about this new Cesium-based viewer:

The 3D underground viewer swissgeol will be the main entry point for swisstopo to access geological data in the future, and it could become an essential collaboration tool for the entire earth science community in Switzerland and surrounding areas.

Visualizing bedrock beneath the terrain in Camptocamp’s 3D underground viewer.

These live code examples show how to use the new globe transparency features:

TypeScript

Finally, in version 1.70, CesiumJS now ships with official TypeScript type definitions! The latest and correct definition file will be released with each new version, and TypeScript support will be officially tracked as part of the CesiumJS GitHub repository.

Even if you’re not a TypeScript user, the nature of this work has improved the correctness and completeness of the CesiumJS API reference documentation, making it a big win for the entire CesiumJS community.

Read more about how this works and the effort involved in Matt’s deep architectural dive.

Try CesiumJS 1.70

Update to the latest CesiumJS and let us know what you think! You can post any feedback and questions about this release in this forum thread | Cesium Chinese Community: http://cesium.coinidea.com/.

Download link:

Author: Omar Shehata

Original link: https://cesium.com/blog/2020/06/01/cesium-june-release/

Comment: TypeScript makes the framework more robust and professional. Cesium OSM is indeed great, but it requires Cesium ion, showing Cesium’s determination to promote Cesium ion.

Cesium Chinese Website QQ Group: 807482793

Cesium Chinese Website: http://cesiumcn.org/ | China Fast Access: http://cesium.coinidea.com/