Earlier this week on an Eclipse Foundation Locationtech teleconference, Matt Ford of Cesium provided an overview and demonstration of the features of Cesium. You can watch the video here.
Cesium is an open source virtual globe and map library written in JavaScript using WebGL. It provides hardware-accelerated graphics in a browser without a plugin. Cesium supports a 3D globe, 2D map, and 2.5D with the same API. Cesium allows you to layer imagery from multiple sources, including imagery (WMS, OpenStreetMap, Bing Maps, ArcGIS MapServer, and standard image files) and vector data (KML, ESRI Shapefiles, WebGL, JSON).
It supprts vector editing including pionts (labels and markers), polylines, polygons with holes, circles, ellipses, and other shapes. It also supports cameras and animation. One of the cool things Matt showed was a camera following a satellite. And perhaps the coolest capability is materials which alows you to define the appearance of the surface of objects using textures such as water, checkerboard, stripes, dots, brick, cement, asphalt, wood, grass, diffuse map, specular map, reflection, and refraction.
Functionality that Cesium already supports in beta and that looked impressive in Matt's demonstration is digital terrain models. Functionality currently under development are
- Models - the example shown was a rubber duck
- Integration with other open source packages - the example shown was a plugin for GeoServer
But perhaps the most exciting capability to look forward to is an OpenLayers API on top of Cesium. This would provide OpenLayers with an extremely rich set of 3D capabilities in the very near future.
Subscribe
Comments