Zoom In, Scale Up: Why Infrastructure Innovators Are Turning to Cesium’s 3D Geospatial Tech

Mark Pittman parlayed his frustration with a broken traffic light into a pioneering startup that today uses artificial intelligence (AI), machine vision, and cloud computing to help maintain the nation’s roads more intuitively and effectively. Since its launch in 2014, Blyncsy has delivered intelligence and near real-time status updates to transportation departments across the U.S. and Europe, helping the agencies create safer roads for both drivers and maintenance crews.

Emerging as an industry leader, Blyncsy was acquired by Bentley Systems, the infrastructure engineering software company, in 2023. Now another Bentley acquisition, 3D geospatial company Cesium, is elevating the Blyncsy experience. The partnership illustrates why many architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) organizations rely on Cesium to innovate how they design, build, manage, and maintain critical infrastructure.

Here’s how the partnership works: Blyncsy crowdsources images from more than 1.2 million vehicles. It stores and analyzes the data in the cloud and provides users access via open Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, that link to their platforms and transportation managements systems. This is where Cesium comes in. The company and its 3D visualization technology can quickly bring to life traffic patterns, road conditions, and infrastructure health insights found in Blyncsy’s data analysis. The U.S. Department of Transportation, along with government agencies in the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe are already using Blyncsy to address road safety, maintenance, and repair operations.

“Our users make sense of our data visually—they want to see things,” Pittman says. “Cesium takes our API and maps images we collect on the roadway to a position in space and time. Very few applications can support the velocity and scale of what we do.”

The big picture

As the foundational 3D geospatial platform, Cesium is used by tens of thousands of application developers, from former startups like Blyncsy to global companies like Japan’s Komatsu. Cesium technology manages and visualizes 3D geospatial data and creates immersive, video game-like experiences that mirror the real world. If you enjoyed NORAD’s Tracks Santa on Christmas Eve, saw Paris in 3D during NBC’s 2024 Summer Games coverage from Paris, or watched fly-bys of 3D city views during FOX Sports 2024 NFL coverage, you’ve seen Cesium.

“I’m committed to the long game, which means making decisions for the collective benefit of the entire ecosystem,” says Patrick Cozzi, Cesium founder and Bentley’s chief platform officer. “With open standards, companies and developers come together to contribute their best solutions, and everyone benefits.”

3D Tiles, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) community standard introduced by Cesium, enables efficient streaming and visualization of massive 3D geospatial datasets. It breaks them down into manageable pieces that can be streamed as an interactive experience to web browsers and 3D creation engines on a variety of devices and across environments. This provides valuable context and helps infrastructure professionals make more informed decisions.

Plug-and-play platform

The platform’s open-source foundation and easy interoperability with other tools and applications were big selling points for Blyncsy. “As a venture-funded startup building our business from the ground up, we wanted to focus solely on the technology we bring to the table—specifically, using computer vision to analyze dashcam imagery and deliver intelligence,” Pittman says. “Building a user interface or a mapping platform was outside our scope, so the easiest path by far was to piggyback off Cesium’s open, plug-and-play ecosystem. We were able to get up and running in under six hours, with very little tweaking to get the viewer and maps the way we wanted them to look.”

A powerful package

City of Helsinki uses 6DPlanner to manage city planning and area construction projects integrated with Helsinki city model.

Other examples include Finland-based 6DPlanner, a project management platform for digital twins that model anything in the built environment, such as buildings, roads, parks, railways, and tunnels. The platform used Cesium to combine several disciplines into a single urban “6D” model. The model integrates data stored in different formats, including BIM, GIS, CAD, and city models, as well as survey data, photogrammetry, point clouds, documents, photos, and other information.

Architects, engineers, and contractors use 6DPlanner to coordinate their work. They can also monitor their project progress from planning, design, and construction to maintenance and operations. They use the platform to manage schedules (4D), estimation (5D), life cycle impacts (6D), tasks, risks, requirements, ideas, issues, and other important aspects of the project. “We have been focusing on making everything as easy as possible for anyone to use,” says Jarkko Sireeni, 6DPlanner’s CEO. “We like to say we’re a Microsoft Office package for construction projects.”

With Cesium, 6DPlanner users can visualize assets like a new building or a bridge in a real-world environment by providing context of what will be around those assets. Users can combine existing and future models, along with site planning of the construction site, and share links to cloud-based data with other project stakeholders. “The biggest value for us is that Cesium supports and brings together so many different data types,” Sireeni says. “And since it’s open-source, development work—including adding extensions or customizations—is much smoother and faster.”

6DPlanner is piloting the Cesium for Unreal plugin at a construction project in Helsinki, Finland’s capital. Stakeholders will be able visualize the site model with virtual reality (VR) headsets and augmented reality (AR) via mobile devices.

A robust foundation for digital twins

Bentley acquired Cesium in September 2024 to bring together Cesium’s 3D geospatial platform with Bentley’s deep community of AEC users. By bringing together digital twins and 3D geospatial visualizations, the deal helped create the most comprehensive platform for the built and natural environment, says Chris Andrews, head of platform integrations at Bentley.

“The combination of Cesium’s open-source technology and Bentley’s existing investment in the iTwin platform for infrastructure digital twins creates value beyond the individual accomplishments of either platform,” he says. “Together, we’re building a robust foundation for digital twins that can be used for everything from urban planning to environmental monitoring and emergency response.”

Geospatial get-together

Bentley will welcome the open geospatial community to Philadelphia in June for the Cesium Developer Conference. The three-day summit focuses on the community, with user presentations by startups as well as large enterprise organizations such as Arcadis, WSP, and Mott MacDonald.

Cesium 3D Tiles for meshes helps to achieve massive scale 3D digital twins.

“The biggest concentration of conference talks will focus on AEC [architecture, engineering and construction] and digital twin implementations,” Andrews says. “The event marks an inflection point for Bentley. It demonstrates our commitment to growing the open geospatial ecosystem by driving new ideas, collaboration, and capabilities. We’re also building out additional tools in the Bentley portfolio that can serve as open foundations for innovation and business growth.”

According to Andrews, companies are embracing Cesium because users are seeking interoperability as well as new business models.

“There’s enough momentum in the Cesium ecosystem now, especially with Photorealistic 3D Tiles, to carry weight when it comes to technology decision-making for startups,” Andrews says. “For example, AerialSphere builds a panoramic viewer into Cesium. Geocam has built a reality capture workflow that streams high-fidelity reality meshes and photos into Cesium. Atomic Maps builds tools to manage geospatial data lakes to feed AI training and inference and then uses Cesium for open standards-based data visualization and transmission.”

Other examples include Australia-based IMMERSIV, which uses Cesium for Unreal for its virtual display showroom. For example, it creates 3D immersive tours of real estate to improve the buying and selling experience. And the PublicTwin platform, from a company called drip visual, opens up the urban planning process to citizen input with Photorealistic 3D Tiles and Cesium for Unreal.

Open source for business

Cesium champions open source and open standards, including CesiumJS and 3D Tiles. Together with Google, Nvidia, Intel and others, Cesium and Bentley are also members of The Khronos Group, a nonprofit industry consortium responsible for developing more than 20 of the most widely used open interoperability standards in 3D graphics, parallel processing, machine learning, and other technology.

“With open standards, the big winners are the users,” says Julien Moutte, Bentley’s chief technology officer. “They are given the freedom of choice for their tools, the capacity to integrate with and extend the software they use, the confidence to be able to work with their data in the long run, and the flexibility given by an increased interoperability between vendors.”

Moutte adds that “vendors are also winning here. What used to be walled gardens become territories of opportunities and partnerships, creating growth by increasing the size of the pie and the value they can deliver to their users.”

A powerful combination

Engineering and construction firms around the world are interested in the benefits of the Bentley and Cesium combination. For example, Komatsu—the world’s second-largest construction equipment manufacturer—uses Cesium’s 3D geospatial technology to monitor construction sites globally and perform precise measurements. With Cesium integrated into Bentley, Komatsu gains expanded access to world-leading digital twin technology.

The poet William Blake once saw the whole world in a grain of sand. Cesium users can now experience something similar, in reverse: They can see their whole world and zoom to their project’s tiniest parts.