Features
Screen shots to follow soon...
Cesium supports a 3D globe, 2D map, and Columbus view (2.5D) with the same API. The scene can transition between views with one line of code.
- Drawing dynamic scenes from CZML.
- Drawing imagery from Bing, Esri, OpenStreetMap, and WMS.
- Drawing vector data from KML (partial support), ESRI Shapefiles, and WebGL Globe JSON.
- Drawing polylines, polygons, circles, ellipses, extents, billboards, labels, and sensors.
- Picking individual objects.
- Batching and GPU optimizations for performance.
- Cesium Viewer app for visualizing CZML files.
- Sandbox app for live coding.
- Timeline widget for scrubbing through time.
- Cesium and timeline widget for use with Dojo.
Checkout all the demos.
Cameras control the view and respond to input.
- Spindle - spin, zoom, and pan the globe.
- Flight - flies to a destination.
- Free look - look in any direction.
Materials describe the surface appearance of objects in the scene.
- Procedural textures - checkerboard, stripes, dots, brick, cement, asphalt, wood, grass, distance intervals, tie dye, ...
- Classic: diffuse map, specular map, alpha map, normal map, bump map, emission map, reflection, refraction, and Fresnel.
- A JSON schema for combing materials.
For those needing custom drawing, Cesium contains a thin abstraction over WebGL that provides:
- Built-in GLSL uniforms for common transformations.
- Built-in GLSL functions for ellipsoids, rays, noise, lighting, Constructive Solid Geometry (experimental), ...
- Shader programs and caching.
- Textures and cube maps.
- Dynamic texture atlas packing.
- Buffers, vertex arrays, and vertex layout.
- Render states.
- Framebuffers and renderbuffers.
- View frustum and occlusion culling (horizon culling).
- Vertex cache optimization.
- Polygon triangulation and subdivision.
- Tessellation of ellipsoids, extents, boxes, and planes.
- Bounding spheres and axis-aligned bounding boxes.
- Types for Cartesian, spherical, and cartographic positions.
- Types for matrices and quaternions.
- Catmull-Rom splines.
- Lagrange, Hermite, spherical linear, and linear interpolation.
- Sun position.
- Equidistant Cylindrical and Mercator 2D map projections.
- Computations on ellipsoids such as computing computing surface normals, circles, ellipses, and tangent planes.
- Transformations such as cartographic to Cartesian, and east-north-up to fixed frame.
- Julian dates, leap seconds, time intervals, and UTC and TAI time standards.
- JSONP.
- Generic event handling.
Use the Quick Start to get up and running with Cesium, or read the Architecture Overview to learn about the architecture and code.