Hi. I’m new to Cesium and am a bit confused with CesiumJS and Cesium Ion. We are trying to build a commercial 3D mapping application and want to use CesiumJS because it is open source. However, in the app it self. Cesium Ion has a tag that says “this is not a commercial version” or something like that. I need to know if I can use CesiumJS in my web application commercially and any guidance on how to understand the sandcastle tutorials.
Any help is appreciated. Thank you.
Hi Joel,
Thanks for reaching out!
CesiumJS is an open source high-precision 3D geospatial library built for the web. CesiumJS allows you to 3D geospatial data in a variety of open formats including TMS, WMTS, 3D Tiles and more to create semantically rich 3D geospatial applications.You can find examples and use-cases on the CesiumJS Sandcastle. CesiumJS is free and open source for both commercial and non-commercial use.
Cesium ion is our subscription-based cloud service for hosting, tiling, and streaming 3D content and geospatial data. Cesium ion includes global curated data such as Bing Maps Imagery, Cesium World Terrain and Cesium OSM Buildings, which allow our users to create immersive 3D experiences. In addition to curated data, ion subscribers can upload their own data, which the platform will process into 3D Tiles for streaming over the web. Cesium ion is free to sign up and evaluate. Pls. refer to this link for the complete list of data formats we support.
The tiles streamed (like Bing Maps, Cesium world terrain, OSM buildings) from Cesium ion is not free for commercial use. You can certainly turn off the layers if you don’t intend to Cesium ion. We do offer a free community tier that can be used for:
Would you be able to share more information on the solution you are planning to deploy? Please share any workflows, use-cases, data requirements with us so that we can share the most relevant product and technical information with you.
Let me know if you have any additional questions.
Best,
Muthu
Hi Muthu,
Thank you for the detailed reply. We are a small business, trying to build a product that will be used for government development (e.g. our last project was understanding and developing risk profiles for communities in developing countries). We want to develop a 3D product that will be able to let the user upload point clouds or other 3D models and visualize it in the web browser. We did this in the past using Cesium Ion. We generated an asset ID which we used in the code. We need to develop it using CesiumJS since that is open source. If that is possible, please advise.
Thank you.
Hi Joel,
Thanks for the information.
This is certainly possible. The proposed workflow would be to have your customers to upload to a common S3 bucket and then connect with Cesium ion for processing the data to 3D tilesets. Here is a blog on this topic.
We do have the Cesium ion REST API allows you to add discovery, uploading, 3D Tiling, and streaming of massive 3D datasets to your applications and workflows. This will require authentication in the form of an access token but it is best if you use this method only uploading your own data. Once the data is processed, you can use the generated asset ID for visualizing in the CesiumJS based application. I hope that helps.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Best,
Muthu
Hi Muthu,
Thank you for pointing me towards the blog post. My question is even though I choose to automate the tiling process I would still need to create a Cesium Ion community account right. Would this still be feasible for a commercial application? in other words, by using Cesium Ion would it still be open source?
Thank you.
Hi Joel,
CesiumJS is open source for commercial and non-commercial use whereas Cesium ion is a paid service for commercial user. Cesium ion is required if your application needs data to be processed as 3D tiles. For commercial use, you will need a paid account (commercial or premium tier). I hope that clarifies things for you.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Best,
Muthu
Hi Muthu,
It does clarify. Thanks for helping me understand.
Best,
Joel.