CSGROUP is happy to announce the release of VirtualGeo 9.0 with new features and improvements.

The latest release of VirtualGeo brings you many enhancements and technical innovations:

• New renderer and Unreal Plugin !
• Massive performance improvements
• Improved 3D Tiles support.
• Web and multi-thread
• Server and dynamic data

See What's New for more details

For the next version of our #VirtualGeo software suite coming out in May 2023, we are pleased to announce the first official release of the Unreal Engine plugin ! With this plugin, users can easily import, visualise and analyse any #3d #geospatialdata to create real-time and accurate game-standard graphic rendering for simulations.

Given that VirtualGeo supports many standard geospatial data formats and protocols such as OGC CDB, OGC 3D Tiles, OpenFlight and streaming protocols (WMS, WMTS, WFS), these can be easily imported into Unreal and displayed in real time. No need for complex setups, no pre-processing constraints... and the level of performance is simply unprecedented! The terrain built with VirtualGeo supports complex lighting and physics, it is completely integrated into Unreal Engine to construct advanced simulations.

Please note this first release is fully compatible with the latest version of Unreal Engine (v 5.1) to fully support world-wide rendering based on the Large World Coordinates (LWC) in Unreal Engine 5. Compatibility with the 4.27 version is also available on demand.

Check out this video, which demonstrates the VirtualGeo Unreal plugin.

Cesium is a well-known competitive solution of VirtualGeo Web, designed to display high-resolution mapping data in a Web page.

Both offer a similar set of Web features, but looking “under the hood”, the approach is very different.

VirtualGeo is based on a native engine developed in C++, which is translated into Web Assembly, see here for more details.

CesiumJS is based on a pure Javascript engine. Thanks to our 3DTIles support, it is now quite easy to compare both approaches and engines in terms of memory and CPU consumption on a same dataset.

As the base dataset for our comparison, we have chosen to use the highly detailed city of Strasbourg



See the result below :

The 8.1 version of VirtualGeo brings you support for a new, standard format: 3D Tiles!

3D Tiles is a format, which has been pushed by Cesium. It is an specification built on glTF, an open standard for efficient streaming and rendering of 3D models and scenes.

This format has many important features for dealing with massive heterogeneous 3D geospatial content across desktop, Web and mobile applications in a standard and open format.

3D Tiles is now supported by VirtualGeo ! The 8.1 version includes preliminary support, mainly focused on 3D Tiles visualisation for large textured 3D mesh.

The forthcoming release (9.0) will also offer the capability to produce 3D Tiles from source cartographic data using the VirtualGeo solution.