Introducing Project Anywhere XR: a free sample project for mixed reality 3D geospatial visualization

The global pandemic has changed the way we live and work, forcing the simulation industry to find innovative new ways to analyze, learn, and train that will continue to benefit us long after the current impetus is over. Cloud deployment and extended reality (XR) have become more crucial to simulation applications than ever before, as stakeholders around the world collaborate at a distance.

At the same time, we’re seeing an evolving ecosystem of increasingly powerful real-time software and hardware technologies which, when combined together, offer extraordinary potential in the simulation arena.

At the end of 2020, Epic Games got together with NVIDIA, Microsoft, and 3D geospatial leader Cesium to demonstrate this potential to attendees at vIITSEC (the virtual version of I/ITSEC) by creating Project Anywhere, a new proof of concept for a scalable real-time interactive simulation environment. 

This original project streamed worldwide high-resolution 3D Tiles, the open standard for massive, heterogeneous 3D geospatial datasets, from Cesium ion. To make it accessible to anyone, anywhere, it streamed the content from the cloud using Unreal Engine’s Pixel Streaming feature, enabling attendees to run it from their homes on their PCs, mobile devices, or tablets.

Now, we’ve taken that project to the next level by streaming it to the Microsoft HoloLens 2, bringing the richer interaction and immersion of XR experiences to Project Anywhere.

Project Anywhere XR will be presented live at this year's GEOINT Symposium, October 5-8, 2021 in St Louis, MO. Just drop by the Cesium booth #2431 to meet the team and get a demo. If you're not able to make that event, you can watch a full demonstration video on the GTC 2021 website, where the project was first showcased.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re making Project Anywhere XR available to download for free as an Unreal Engine sample project, for you to explore, learn from, and adapt to your own requirements. 

The application features an interface developed using Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Toolkit (MRTK) for Unreal that enables you to select your region of interest, teleport anywhere, and freely navigate from space-eye view down to detailed terrain and buildings. As you navigate, the appropriate level of detail is automatically streamed, from Bing map data to OpenStreetMap  (OSM) Buildings to photogrammetry data sets. All of these are supplied by the Cesium for Unreal plugin, without manual creation or preprocessing.

Project Anywhere XR is just a demonstration of what’s possible using these platforms. Your requirements and ideas will be different, but we hope it will stimulate conversations and help you unlock this amazing potential in your own interactive applications.