3D rendering with Cesium
In our final example, called ch09_cesium
, we will integrate Cesium into our application. Cesium is a 3D web mapping application, capable of rendering ordinary OWS layers and features on a globe and creating DEM visualizations with elevation tiles. It can display various spatial data in 2D and 3D, knows some projections, and on top of visualizing elevation data, it can also render 3D objects using various 3D-capable formats.
The only problem with Cesium is that it would be very hard to synchronize with OpenLayers 3. Luckily, the OpenLayers 3 developer team created an integration library, which can utilize the 3D capabilities of Cesium. The downside of this approach is the limitation of the capabilities of Cesium. We can use the 3D renderer, Web Mercator, and the WGS84 projections (EPSG:3857 and EPSG:4326), and we can access the currently used Cesium scene. The library automatically synchronizes the scene with our OpenLayers 3 map, and if we know how to use Cesium...