07 October 2021

Project Anywhere XR

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, they have 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. 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 pre-processing.

More information:

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/introducing-project-anywhere-xr-a-free-sample-project-for-mixed-reality-3d-geospatial-visualization