Hello Cesium users!
As you might have noted, last year Microsoft announced end of life for Bing Maps. For most users, the end of life is rapidly approaching - June 30, 2025. However, Cesium is an Enterprise Bing Maps customer, and the latest possible end date for our use is June 30, 2028. If you are using Bing Maps through Cesium ion, you can continue to do so without worry. In fact, if you are losing access to Bing data through another means and want more time before switching to an alternative, Cesium ion can help.
We’re evaluating replacements for the Bing assets in Cesium ion. We’ll make an announcement as soon as we know our decision. Our plan will include time for you and other ion users to test the replacement before Bing Maps is no longer available through ion. However, it’s likely we will remove Bing assets from ion prior to the latest date in 2028, so please do stay tuned to be sure you take advantage of the transition time period. Follow this issue to keep up with our plans.
We’d also love to hear from you about how you use Bing now and what is most important to you in the replacement we choose. Leave comments below.
Regards,
Lisa Bos
Product Manager, Cesium ion
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Hi @lisabos,
Are there plans to replace the CesiumBingMapsRasterOverlay in Unity / Unreal engine with an Azure Maps equivalent? Note this is separate then the Cesium ion solutions… and allows a personal Bing Maps key to be used. The equivalent should be available for Azure Maps no? We will be loosing access to our basic (free) Bing key come the June 30, 2025 deadline. That may be a problem, just not for me but many others that are using the BingMapsRasterOverlay solution.
Hi @5DRealities! Sorry for the slow reply. We do plan to add Azure Maps support in the Native clients (Unity, Unreal, …). Please follow this issue on the Native repo to keep up with progress.
Hi @lisabos,
I don’t know if AI is making stuff up (again), in this case, Gemini Pro, but it apparently found this blog post quote from Cesium, saying:
“We’re excited to announce Cesium for Microsoft Bing Maps, a new platform offering that combines our 3D tiling pipeline with Bing Maps’ high-quality global satellite and aerial imagery and 3D city data”
I’ve checked over the years, but I never saw any Bing Maps 3D tileset in the Asset depot - only its raster overlays. Is a secondary ‘global’ 3D tileset asset to Google being sought (due to both Google and Microsoft’s history of shutting down services)?
@shimonko I wasn’t able to find that quote in any of our blog posts, so I asked AI to see if it could find it (ChatGPT, not Gemini, I don’t have access to Gemini). ChatGPT told me it was a direct quote from this Microsoft blog post: Cesium: Fast and Consistent Bing Maps Tile Performance Powers 3D...
Now, that quote doesn’t actually appear in that article. I believe the quote is an AI rephrasing of this bit from the article:
Bing Maps looks great laid on top of Cesium World Terrain and is the base for other 3D content that our users load into Cesium, such as point clouds, photogrammetry, 3D buildings, vector data, BIM/CAD models, and 3D models.
Which is not referring to Bing Maps 3D city data, but to Bing Maps being used alongside other 3D city data. I know Bing Maps does have 3D city data - and quite good 3D data at that! - but I’m not aware of it currently being available outside of Microsoft, through ion or anywhere else.
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I spent a while looking through the blogs initially too and couldn’t find it. It’s pretty bad when AI changes quotes - maybe mimicking humans too closely!
Yeah, the only time I saw the 3D Cities available was via the Maps SDK for Unity and that was more of an Innovation Friday type exercise.