{"data":{"news":{"items":[{"title":"Bentley bolsters Cesium with reality modelling capabilities, brings geospatial context to infrastructure engineering","date":"2025-11-07 00:18:42","id":6048,"author":"","blurb":"","blurb_image_uid":"https://dxfpracgmlczp.cloudfront.net/2025/10/1761402918815_yii-press-release-2-cesium-image-3-1.jpeg","blurb_expanded_image_uid":null,"article":"\n\t\n\n\n

Bentley Systems has announced the availability of reality modelling services in Cesium, advancing its open platform for the built and natural environment. It also unveiled geospatial capabilities for project delivery and asset performance and a new immersive engagement application for infrastructure teams and stakeholders, all powered by Cesium.

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Since acquiring Cesium a year ago, Bentley has made significant progress in integrating technologies from both companies, powering its own products and empowering developers to build applications that visualise infrastructure data in real time and in full geospatial context.

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“Our vision for infrastructure engineering is built on openness,” said Patrick Cozzi, Bentley’s chief platform officer. “With the integration of iTwin and Cesium capabilities, we are creating the open platform for the built and natural environment – providing all the necessary data for infrastructure professionals to design, build and operate in a real-world context.”

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Reality modelling and AI-powered analysis

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Bentley has added reality modelling services from iTwin Capture to Cesium ion, creating a complete, automated pipeline from data capture through geospatial visualisation. iTwin Capture creates engineering-grade reality models from imagery and applies AI-powered feature detection, while Cesium ion allows developers to create and host content in the cloud to power 3D geospatial applications.

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With the new reality modelling capabilities, Cesium ion can create detailed 3D visualisations – reality meshes, point clouds and Gaussian splats – directly from imagery, annotated by AI, ready to stream within applications using open standards. Creating an accurate, engineering-grade digital model of the existing built and natural environment and offering it as rich 3D geospatial context allows infrastructure professionals to make better informed decisions throughout the infrastructure lifecycle.

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“Being able to generate photogrammetry, point clouds and Gaussian splats as 3D Tiles from drone imagery, stream them seamlessly to the web, and analyse the point clouds is a major milestone,” said Osarodion Victory Igbinobaro, co-founder and CEO of Aero AI, a Cesium user. “This release brings end-to-end 3D reality modelling into one accessible, high-performance pipeline.”

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The reality modelling capabilities in Cesium ion will be generally available before the end of 2025.

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Geospatial context

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Cesium capabilities are also enhancing Bentley’s product portfolio, bringing geospatial context to Bentley Open Applications and Bentley Infrastructure Cloud.

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MicroStation 2025, the latest release of Bentley’s CAD software for infrastructure design, introduces support for 3D Tiles via Cesium. Engineers can now seamlessly integrate any 3D Tiles content, including Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles and their own high-fidelity reality data, directly into their design projects. This reduces the need to manually model existing conditions, accelerating project setup and allowing teams to focus on designing solutions. These same capabilities are coming to Bentley Open Applications built on MicroStation, for designing roads, railways, bridges, and more.

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Cesium is also powering the geospatial experience in Bentley Infrastructure Cloud Connect, Bentley’s unified environment to connect data and people across the infrastructure lifecycle. With this geospatial context, also featuring Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles, users can navigate more intuitively across and within their projects and assets available in Bentley Infrastructure Cloud.

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Introducing iTwin Engage

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Another highlight from Bentley is the new iTwin Engage, which enables infrastructure teams and their stakeholders to engage immersively with digital twins of future and existing infrastructure assets.

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Engineers often need to create immersive, photorealistic renderings to present their design work. Traditionally, this process is slow and inefficient, requiring specialised skills and resulting in static visuals that quickly become outdated as the design models evolve.

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With iTwin Engage, powered by Cesium and game engine technology, anyone can build impactful, narrative-driven content that brings projects and assets to life. Experiences are automatically generated, always current thanks to a live connection to the digital twin, and interactive – enabling not only design reviews, but also digital rehearsals for construction, immersive remote inspections, and more.

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“The opportunity to present and communicate the project plan through iTwin Engage, in such an appealing manner, is fantastic,” said Simon Beards, principal planner at Laing O’Rourke, a participant in an early access programme. “The greater the involvement the team has on the plan, the more likely there is a chance of success, as it supports a more collaborative way of engineering improvements.”

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iTwin Engage will be in limited availability by the end of 2025.

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All images: Bentley Systems

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Bentley Systems has announced a strategic partnership with Google to integrate Google’s high-quality geospatial content with Bentley’s infrastructure engineering software and digital twin platform to improve the way infrastructure is designed, built and operated.

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As a digital representation of the physical world, digital twins unlock meaningful value and insights throughout the infrastructure lifecycle, from project planning and design through construction and asset operation. By leveraging the engineering data created and managed in Bentley software alongside Google’s geospatial data, AI and analytics, and cloud technologies, engineers can design and manage infrastructure in context and at scale to address today’s most urgent challenges, from mitigating climate risk to maintaining ageing infrastructure.

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Through the partnership, Bentley software users and developers can use Google Maps Platform’s geospatial content, including Google’s Photorealistic 3D Tiles, for real-world geospatial context and immersive 3D experiences in their digital workflows. This partnership complements Bentley’s recent acquisition of Cesium, the foundational open platform for creating powerful 3D geospatial applications. Cesium is the creator of the 3D Tiles open standard used by Google. Bentley is also collaborating with Google Cloud to deliver AI-driven insights for asset analytics.

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“By combining Google’s extensive geospatial content and cloud capabilities with Bentley’s infrastructure engineering software and digital twin platform, infrastructure professionals can improve their work and ensure projects and assets are created and operated with greater resilience and sustainability,” said Bentley CEO Nicholas Cumins. “This partnership demonstrates how open standards, such as 3D Tiles, can help infrastructure professionals evolve their practices by leveraging the power of geospatial context.”

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Chris Phillips, vice president and general manager of Geo at Google, commented, “Photorealistic 3D Tiles in Google Maps Platform power breathtaking immersive experiences and can transform workflows for architects, engineers and urban planners. We’re excited to partner with Bentley to bring powerful geospatial context and capabilities that can dramatically improve how infrastructure is designed, built and operated with data.”

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All images: Bentley Systems

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Bentley Systems has acquired 3D geospatial company Cesium – the latter of which is recognised as the foundational open platform for creating powerful 3D geospatial applications, and its 3D Tiles open standard has been widely adopted by leading enterprises, governments and tens of thousands of application developers globally. Cesium ion, the company’s SaaS platform, brings 3D geospatial experiences to more than one million active devices every month, while Cesium’s open-source offerings have more than 10 million downloads.

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Bentley’s iTwin Platform powers digital twin solutions that are used by engineering and construction firms and owner-operators to design, build and operate the world’s infrastructure. The combination of Cesium plus iTwin enables developers to seamlessly align 3D geospatial data with engineering, subsurface, IoT, reality and enterprise data to create digital twins with astonishing user experiences that scale from vast infrastructure networks to the millimeter-accurate details of individual assets – viewed from land, sky and sea, from outer space to deep below the earth’s surface.

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Bentley CEO Nicholas Cumins said, “A 3D geospatial view is the most intuitive way for owner-operators and engineering services providers to search for, query and visualise information about infrastructure networks and assets. With the combined capabilities of Cesium and iTwin, infrastructure professionals can make better informed decisions in full 3D geospatial context – all within a single, highly performant environment.”

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Cesium CEO Patrick Cozzi added, “Joining Bentley marks an important milestone for Cesium as we continue our journey to create the best developer platform for the built and natural environment – founded on open standards and open-source technologies. The combined power of our two organisations and our shared commitment to openness will provide new opportunities for growth and create greater value for an already flourishing developer ecosystem that ranges from small start-ups to global enterprises.”

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An example is Komatsu, the largest construction equipment manufacturer in Japan, and the second largest in the world, which uses Cesium’s 3D geospatial technology to monitor construction sites globally, track changes over time, compare architectural plans with real-world data, and run precise and near real-time measurements. With Cesium integrated into Bentley, Komatsu gains expanded access to world-leading digital twin technology.

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Chikashi Shike, executive officer of Smart Construction Promotion Division at Komatsu Ltd, commented, “Komatsu and Cesium brought novel thinking to the construction industry by leveraging advanced visualisations to deliver more precise insights and enable our customers to make better, more informed construction decisions. With Cesium as part of Bentley, we can further enrich our Smart Construction digital twins with engineering models, subsurface data, and more, for safer and more efficient construction projects.”

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In addition to the widespread adoption of its platform, Cesium is also a leader in promoting open standards, such as 3D Tiles for visualising massive 3D geospatial data, which was adopted as a community standard by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) in 2019.

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“As infrastructure sectors become more data-centric, the importance of an open ecosystem will only increase,” said Peter Rabley, CEO of OGC. “As the leading voice for open standards and interoperability in the geospatial community, OGC welcomes the ongoing commitment of Bentley and Cesium to solve global challenges through open, interoperable platforms.”

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With the acquisition, Mr Cozzi was named Bentley chief platform officer, leading the development of the combined Cesium and iTwin platform offerings, reporting to Bentley chief technology officer Julien Moutte.

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All images: Bentley Systems

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