From a 30 second glance at the cesium web site ... (which means I'm happy for someone to correct any of this that I got wrong.)
- Cesium looks interesting and powerful if your use case is a good fit.
- It looks like you need to sign up for an account to use the system. There is a free personal account option with a 5Gb storage limit.
- It looks like cesium hosts/serves all your 3d map content. Is there a way to use the software tools and host the code and data entirely yourself?
- Each plan has a limit on per month data streaming.
- I don't see anything about open-source on the site.
Speaking for myself, I ended up building a 3d rendering app using python + the panda3d package. There are strengths and weaknesses to this choice ... like any choice.
One of my average data sets could be 10-20-30+ Gb which quickly pushes me into cesium's commercial (or premium?) category. Only a small number of people are periodically interested in my maps, so I would probably hit the data storage limit way before I would hit the streaming limit.
For my own needs I developed a python 3d app to render my maps. Python has a 3d "scene graph" package available called panda3d (sometimes referred to as a "game engine".) You aren't going to build the next great xbox360 game with all the latest visual effects with this, but for basic 3d modeling and display it is very nice. The downside is that my end users need to download and install an app on their local PC. The other downside is that my end users need to download the entire image set from a flight before they can examine it. The plus side is that after doing that, they can now quickly examine every detail of every image in the data set close up (with all the original images being drawn in their correct map orientation/scale/position to fit together seamlessly.) It's a little hard to describe in words, and the answer to "why do it this way?" is that our use case involves hunting for details. We are looking for invasive plants in two of my projects so we want to get close in and see detail ... yet we need to be able to simultaneously manage and quickly navigate image sets with 1000 or 3000+ images. 3000 images in a data set is part of the curse of building my own fixed wing drone that can fly 75+ minute missions...
It could be interesting for me to find a non-expensive way to host and share my large data sets so that end users just click a link and everything comes up in their web browser ... but I'm not sure that is feasible given the size of my data sets and our use case. If cesium was my only tool, I would probably shuffle my approach around to make something work, but I found panda3d + python first and those tools are truly open-source and free.
Curt.
cesium.com
