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Cesium is tailored for virtual globe and map applications, so it provides a higher level of abstraction than general graphics engines for things like streaming terrain and imagery from map servers, drawing KML, accurately referencing a WGS84 ellipsoid, and camera control. Usually these features need to be built on top of a general graphics engine. Cesium also exposes its low-level graphics engine, e.g., WebGL abstractions, a material system, etc., making it quite flexible.
In addition, Cesium is particularly well-suited for visualizing dynamic data on globes and maps, either by using the API directly or generating CZML.
No. Cesium runs without an install. It uses HTML5 standards, namely WebGL, that are natively supported by browsers. The only exception is that Internet Explorer requires the Chrome Frame plugin.
Recent versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari are supported. Internet Explorer is supported by using the Chrome Frame plugin, which is a one-time install that does not require admin rights. Cesium does not currently run on Opera (if you can help with that, please get in touch with us!)
Cesium uses WebGL, and therefore requires a browser that supports WebGL. There is more support information on the WebGL wiki.
The best thing to do is try our demos on your target browser.
On desktops, Cesium supports Windows, Linux, and Mac.
On mobile, some Android browsers, including Firefox and Opera, support WebGL, but are not ready for prime-time as of June, 2012. We hope for better WebGL and Cesium support on Android in late 2012 or early 2013.
Although hacks exist, iOS only officially supports WebGL for iAds developers so we have not tested Cesium on iOS. However, we believe that Apple will see the importance of WebGL and the momentum it has, and make it available to all developers.
Cesium requires a video card that supports WebGL. Almost all video cards from NVIDIA and AMD since 2004 support WebGL.
To see if your video card supports WebGL, visit our WebGL Report.
We haven't tried it, but you may be able to use WebKit, Qt, or node-webgl to develop a desktop app using Cesium. Let us know if you do.
WMS, OpenStreetMap, Bing, and Esri.
WMS and a good bit of KML. We expect WFS later in 2012. We intend to propose CZML as a standard to the OGC when it is battle-tested.
CZML, ESRI Shapefiles, WebGL Globe JSON, and a good bit of KML.
CZML is more general; it is a JSON-based language. It can be stored in a file or dynamically created in memory, and incrementally streamed to a client. See the CZML Guide.
CZML is able to accurately describe values that change over time, such as the position of a vehicle, using a variety of numerical interpolations.
CZML can be a flat file or can be streamed, such as from real-time telemetry from a vehicle in flight. Clients may join and leave the stream while it is in progress.
Absolutely not. We intend to propose CZML as a standard to the OGC when it is battle-tested.
We provide an open source Java and C# library for writing CZML files, and open source converters to convert from formats like KML and Shapefiles to CZML. We encourage everyone to write converters to CZML, add CZML rendering support to their engines, and to discuss CZML on our mailing list.