In General XR News
March 23, 2023 – Cesium, a 3D geospatial software company, has this week announced the release of ‘Cesium for Omniverse,’ an extension that enables 3D geospatial capability for NVIDIA Omniverse, a real-time 3D graphics collaboration development platform.
According to Cesium, its Cesium for Omniverse extension enables developers to create metaverses in precise geospatial context and stream massive real-word 3D content to their applications and simulations. The extension is also free and open source under the Apache 2.0 License.
NVIDIA Omniverse is used to connect, build, and operate industrial metaverse applications such as digital twin simulations. Cesium for Omniverse works with Omniverse Kit-based applications, such as Omniverse USD Composer (formerly Create), a reference application for large-scale world building and advanced 3D scene composition for Universal Scene Description (USD)-based workflows, and Omniverse Code, an integrated development environment for developers.
“The core of Cesium has always been to innovate at the interaction of computer graphics and geospatial by applying graphics techniques to 3D geospatial challenges,” said Patrick Cozzi, Cesium CEO. “Since I entered the graphics field 20 years ago, I’ve watched NVIDIA’s work with intent, and we believe there is a bright future at the intersection of NVIDIA Omniverse and Cesium.”
Cesium for Omniverse includes support for 3D Tiles, the OGC community standard created by Cesium, and integration with Cesium ion to stream 3D geospatial content to the web. The software extension has already been used to simulate Cape Canaveral launch operations in a demo created by Cesium, Epic Games, NVIDIA, and the U.S. Space Force for the Spaceport Integrated Operations Center.
“Ingesting vast amounts of real-world geospatial data into virtual worlds is fundamental to building physically accurate industrial metaverse applications and digital twins,” said Rev Lebaredian, Vice President of Omniverse and simulation technology at NVIDIA. “Geospatial data provides contextual information, spatial relationships and real-time monitoring capabilities — critical for the simulation of real-world environments — and Cesium’s new Omniverse extension will provide leading geospatial technologies to the industrial metaverse community.”
Cesium for Omniverse is Cesium’s fifth runtime engine, joining open source CesiumJS, and the open source plugins Cesium for Unreal, Cesium for Unity, and Cesium for O3DE.
For more information on Cesium and its 3D geospatial software solutions including its Cesium for Omniverse extension, please visit the company’s website.
Image / video credit: Cesium / YouTube
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Sam is the Founder and Managing Editor of Auganix. With a background in research and report writing, he has been covering XR industry news for the past seven years.