The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is excited to announce that the OGC Membership has approved version 1.1 of 3D Tiles for adoption as an official OGC Community Standard. 3D Tiles is used for sharing, visualizing, fusing, and interacting with massive heterogenous 3D geospatial content across desktop, web, mobile – and now metaverse – applications.
Previously referred to as “3D Tiles Next,” Version 1.1 of the 3D Tiles Community Standard is designed for streaming high-resolution, semantically-rich 3D geospatial data to the metaverse. 3D Tiles 1.1 promotes several 3D Tiles 1.0 extensions to ‘core’ and introduces new glTF™ extensions for fine-grained metadata storage. The OGC Community Standard is identical to the Cesium release of version 1.1 of the 3D Tiles specification.
“The collective community experience building with 3D Tiles since 2015, combined with the continued growth of 3D geospatial data availability, especially semantic metadata, and increasing user interest in digital twins and the metaverse has led to this next generation of the 3D Tiles specification,” said Patrick Cozzi, CEO of Cesium. “3D Tiles 1.1 being recognized as an OGC Community Standard encourages an open ecosystem for the benefit of all where the community can leverage the open specification to advance the 3D geospatial industry.”
The primary enhancements in the 3D Tiles version 1.1 include:
- Semantic metadata at multiple granularities;
- Implicit tiling for improved analytics and random access to tiles;
- Multiple contents per tile to support layering and content groupings; and
- Direct references to glTF™ content for better integration with the glTF™ ecosystem.
3D Tiles 1.1 is backwards compatible with 3D Tiles 1.0: valid 1.0 tilesets are also valid 1.1 tilesets.
3D Tiles was first announced at SIGGRAPH in 2015, and was published as an OGC community standard in 2019. Since then, the community has built apps, exporters, APIs, and engines with 3D Tiles to grow an open and interoperable 3D geospatial ecosystem. This collective experience building with 3D Tiles, combined with the continued growth of 3D geospatial data availability, especially semantic metadata, and increasing user interest in digital twins and the metaverse, has led to this revision of the 3D Tiles specification.
A Community Standard is an official standard of OGC that is developed and maintained external to the OGC. The originator of the standard brings to OGC a “snapshot” of their work that is then endorsed by OGC membership as a stable, widely implemented standard that becomes part of the OGC Standards Baseline.
As with any OGC standard, the open 3D Tiles v1.1 OGC Community Standard is free to download and implement. Interested parties can learn more about the standard on OGC’s 3D Tiles Community Standard Page.