CesiumJS Features Checklist

CesiumJS is built with care; code is publicly peer-reviewed, is unit tested with over 90% code coverage, and is statically analyzed, documented, and developed by an experienced team.

Dynamic Geospatial Visualization

• Use 3D Tiles to stream, style, and interact with heterogeneous 3D data, including photogrammetry models, 3D buildings, CAD and BIM exterior and interiors, and point clouds.
  • Style point clouds with size attenuation and Eye-Dome Lighting.
  • Classify 3D tilesets or terrain with another 3D tileset or graphics primitive. Invert classification
  • Optimize streaming performance with Google Draco mesh and point cloud compression.
• Visualize high-resolution global terrain. Optionally exaggerate terrain. Apply procedural materials such as height- or slope-based color ramps.
• Layer imagery from multiple sources, including WMS, TMS, WMTS with time-dynamic imagery, Cesium ion, Bing Maps, Mapbox, GEE, OpenStreetMap, ArcGIS MapServer, standard image files, and custom tiling schemes. Each layer can be alpha-blended with the layers below it, and its brightness, contrast, gamma, hue, and saturation can be dynamically changed. Two layers can be split across the screen.
• Stream terrain, imagery, 3D Tiles, and glTF assets from Cesium ion.
• Use legacy Google Earth Enterprise terrain and imagery
• Industry standard vector formats, such as KML, GeoJSON and TopoJSON, including terrain clamping.
• Draw 3D models using glTF 2.0 with Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) materials, animations, skins, and morph targets. Clamp models to terrain and highlight their silhouette. Use the binary glTF, Google Draco, and WEB3D_quantized_attributes extensions to reduce the file size.
• Create data-driven time-dynamic scenes using CZML and stream massive amounts of time-dynamic data with multi-part CZML.
• Draw and style a wide range of geometries:
  • Polylines and dashed polylines
  • Billboards
  • Labels
  • Points
  • Draw and extrude polygons, polygons with holes, rectangles, circles and ellipses
  • Boxes, cylinders, spheres and ellipsoids
  • Corridors, polyline volumes, and walls
• Clamp polylines, polygons, labels, billboards, and ground-based primitives to the ground/terrain.
• Layer and z-order ground-based primitives.
• Create visual effects including:
  • Shadows, including self-shadows and soft-shadows based on the sun position.
  • Atmosphere, fog, sun, sun lighting, moon, stars, and water.
  • Particle system effects such as smoke, fire, and sparks.
  • Post-processing effects including Ambient Occlusion, Bloom, Depth of Field, Silhouettes, and Lens Flare. Selectively apply post-processing effects to individual primitives. Create custom post-processing effects and pipelines of stages.
  • Fast Approximate Anti-aliasing (FXAA)
  • Efficient translucent primitives using Order Independent Transparency (OIT).
• Apply clipping planes to 3D tilesets, terrain, and 3D models.
• Individual object picking and terrain picking.
• Camera navigation with mouse and touch handlers for rotate, zoom, pan with inertia, flights, free look, and terrain collision detection.
• Batching, culling, and JavaScript and GPU optimizations for performance. Optimized to reduce CPU and power usage when not animating.
• Precision handling for large view distances (logarithmic depth buffer and multiple frusta to avoid z-fighting) and large world coordinates (emulated GPU double precision to avoid jitter
• A 3D globe, 2D map, and Columbus view (2.5D) with the same API. 3D views can use a perspective or orthographic projection.
• Display military symbology, such as MIL-STD-2525 and STANAG APP6, by integrating with milsymbol.
• Cluster points, labels and billboards.

Widgets

• Timeline and animation widgets for controlling simulation time.
• Base layer picker widget for selecting imagery and terrain.
• Selection and info box widgets for highlighting objects and displaying information.
• Geocoder widget for flying to addresses and landmarks using Cesium ion web services and custom services.
• Home view widget to fly to the default camera view.
• Scene mode picker widget to morph between 3D, 2D, and Columbus view.
• Fullscreen widget for toggling fullscreen mode.
• Navigation help widget for providing mouse and touch instructions.
• Performance watch dog for monitoring the frame rate.
• Inspector widget for advanced graphics debugging.
• WebVR widget for viewing Cesium with VR devices like Google Cardboard.

High-Precision Math and Time

• Reference frames such as World Geodetic System (WGS84), International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF), and east-north-up.
• Equidistant Cylindrical and Mercator 2D map projections.
• Conversions such as longitude/latitude/height to Cartesian.
• Fast Cartesian, spherical, cartographic, matrix, and quaternion types.
• Julian dates, leap seconds, and UTC and TAI time standards.

Flexible Deployment

• Use Cesium as a single .js file (plus .css and web-workers .js files) or with Asynchronous Module Definition (AMD) to include only what you use.
• Integrate with Webpack
• Create cross-platform desktop apps with Cesium and Electron.
• Create mobile apps with Cesium and Cordova