What are you building with Cesium now? Work in progress welcome! It’s always inspiring to see what other people are working on.
My latest Cesium project was a Cesium Story I made for kids with a few elementary-level geography highlights: https://cesium.com/ion/stories/viewer/?id=948f457c-bb63-4594-8fb6-7f62faa56a29
I’m building a sequel with more quirky facts.
1 Like
Very cool and informative!
I wasn’t aware of Mount Thor, about 1000 feet higher than El Capitan. I wonder if Alex Honnold has attempted to climb it.
Perhaps the deep ocean section could transport the camera to the
just SW of Guam, not too far from where the camera currently takes you. (a flash light would be useful to examine underwater topography.)
Some possible sequel quirky facts:
I believe the land just south of the Dead Sea is the lowest dry land on Earth at 1/4 mile below sea level!
The peak of
is the farthest surface from the center of the Earth (further than Everest due to the equator bulge.)
(Cayambe volcano being furthest from Earth’s spin axis, both in Ecuador, and both within 1.5 degrees latitude of the equator.)
While the depths of the Arctic Ocean is the closest surface (seafloor) to the center of the Earth (closer than Challenger deep probably also due to the equator bulge.) possibly in Litke Deep.
EDIT: Just measured in Cesium (distance from center of Earth)
chim: 6,384,407
ever: 6,382,235
Chimborazo is roughly 2.2Km further from Earth’s center than Everest.
2 Likes
It’d be fun to dedicate a project just to rock climbing. I’ve seen quite a few CesiumJS hiking apps, but nothing just on rock climbing.
And thanks for the suggestions! I will definitely have to include these in the quirky one. I love the idea of exploring heights vs. closeness to equator.
I suppose Cesium would have to add models to show rocky mountain overhangs and caves. I believe the terrain system doesn’t subscribe to the notion of ‘things on top of other things’ (funny Monty Python sketch BTW!) Though this is fine for probably 99+% of the terrain.
I’m back to working on the Space Navigator plugin I started a few years back. It works great underground coded just as it was years ago, basically it treats negative altitude values the same as positive (did work fine just south of the Dead Sea before.) Even 5DOF mode can pitch over upside down. Just posted a video of underground exploration, will probably make a few more videos.
Kind of weird seeing things reversed. Looking south from India then turning left you expect to see Australia, but instead you see Saudi Arabia. Way cool being able to see the entire planet from one spot though, can’t do that looking from the outside.
Can watch tomorrow’s Solar eclipse virtually on Cesium from atop Mount Everest
I’d like to make a Lunar eclipse video as well, from the viewpoint of the Moon’s surface. This would be easier to do if I make the camera orbit around the Earth with the Moon rather than chasing the Moon using the controller, something for my todo list.
Luckily with Cesium’s time machine I can goto any eclipse past or future
Added another video using a cylinder to find eclipse areas:
I plan to make another one using cones to show umbra and penumbra. However the cones will change length over time, I don’t know about dynamically changing a primitive’s shape, perhaps delete and recreate the primitive each frame? I’ll try it out first using average length cones.
1 Like
I really like this solar eclipse project @Hyper_Sonic! Kind of reminds me of a project idea I’ve had for a while, to recreate this computation of how the ancient Greeks discovered the circumference of the Earth: https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/big-history-project/solar-system-and-earth/knowing-solar-system-earth/a/eratosthenes-of-cyrene (especially since we can set the clock back and see the shadows in Egypt exactly the way they would have seen them!)
One thing I was spending some on last weekend is visualizing some of the photogrammetry made of the protests in the US. It was kind of fun to geolocate this one (trying to match the rainbow flag on the sidewalk from the photogrammetry to the satellite imagery):
Here’s a quick Cesium Story I threw together to visualize this: https://cesium.com/ion/stories/viewer/?id=a0b2532f-f4cf-4cb3-9313-55de2c55f4db.
There’s a lot more photogrammetry like this on this account: https://sketchfab.com/talekeep
Amazing, over 2000 years ago someone accurately calculated the Earth’s circumference, not to mention acknowledged that it was spherically shaped. It wouldn’t be till around 1500 years later until someone sailed around the Earth.
Since precession only varies the tilt from where it is now +/- 1 degree over 40,000 years it probably was pretty much the same. I wonder if Cesium factors in precession. I did discover that you have to pad with 0s till there are 6 characters for BC years, such as 1 BC “-000001-04-08T16:00:00Z” According to Cesium there was a full Moon on -0001 Apr 17, though the Gregorian calendar was not conceived of yet back then.
Cool story! I noticed that some of those models have sound, such as this one
sketchfab.com/3d-models/scan-of-a-fountain-from-castello-carrarese-este-927e8418d14a461aa553de121c8a5bce
It would be neat to copy/paste models into Cesium just as easy as one copy/pastes text. Place a cursor somewhere on the map and paste.
EDIT: just noticed that Cesium will go from -1 year to 0 year. Since neither BC or AD has a 0 year, perhaps year 0 in Cesium translates to -1 BC? I think so:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_year_numbering
“The year 1 BC/BCE is numbered 0, the year 2 BC is numbered −1,”