A Conversation With Patrick Cozzi

Bentley Systems acquired Cesium, putting Partick Cozzi, the founder of Cesium, in a new role. We discuss collaboration, openness, and the future of immersive 3D environments. 

A Little Background

Cesium has been a darling of the geospatial community since its inception in 2011, especially in recent years, when the power of immersive 3D environments for geospatial applications is coming to fruition.

Partick Cozzi, founder of Cesium in 2011, is a geo-folk-hero to many in the geospatial community. 3D Tiles were introduced by Cesium in 2015 and then shepherded into an open standard via the Open Geospatial Consortium. 3D Tiles enable the hierarchical level of display (HLOD) for massive datasets that we have become so accustomed to—zoom and the data appears without overloading computing resources. Cesium also embraced the power of gaming engines. Again, this enables the kind of data richness and responsiveness we have come to expect in today’s geospatial environments.

The geospatial applications Cesium and Bentley Systems provide have had a profound impact, positive impact on solving one of the world’s most pressing problems: the infrastructure gap. The ability to build, update, operate, and maintain infrastructure—transportation, housing and structure, utilities—is falling behind global demand. Legacy tools and methods could never close this gap.

Digitalization of infrastructure lifecycles is proving to significantly improve productivity, timelines, and save costs. Plus, the infrastructure becomes smarter and greener. Leaders in digitizing the design, construction, operations, and maintenance of infrastructure include Bentley Systems, Topcon Positioning Systems, and others. Digital construction, 4D construction, virtual design and construction (VDC), BIM, digital twins, and more, are benefitting tremendously from visually rich environments that have a high spatial fidelity to reality.

Bentley Systems has put digital twins, in the form of their iTwin Platform, into highly productive design software applications. Customers have applied these solutions to infrastructure projects, large and small, worldwide. Sometimes, on a grand scale. For instance, nearly all of the finalists and winners of the Year in Infrastructure Awards 2024 had leveraged digital twinning. In 2022, Bentley was showcasing their “iTwin Experience” as an example of a “single pane of glass” approach of viewing and working in all infrastructure life cycle phases that could be done in an immersive 3D environment.

Cesium has featured in several Bentley-related projects over the past few years. For instance, the iTwin platform began supporting importing 3D Tiles from Cesium in 2020. Plus, both firms have been strong supporters and advocates for open formats and standards.

I have not been alone in hoping that such a collaboration would become more formal. The combined expertise and resources could be a great thing for helping close infrastructure gaps. Now, the two companies have made it official.

On September 6, 2024, Bentley announced that it had acquired Cesium. Patrick Cozzi, Founder of Cesium, is now the Chief Platform Officer for Bentley Systems. Cozzi made his new role debut in a keynote address at the Year in Infrastructure 2024 awards event. We managed to catch him for a brief Q&A afterwards.

A New Role

Schrock          “You have a new role. For those of us not familiar with “C-suite” titles, you are the new Bentley Systems Chief Platform Officer, so this is not just for the Cesium team?”

Cozzi              “Correct. Today, I’m running Cesium, as we did before, basically, and then over the next few months, we’re combining Cesium with the iTwin platform, merging the teams into one organization. Bentley has lots of platforms that multiple products run on. But of course, the iTwin platform is the big platform that everything’s rolling into, which is cool.”

Schrock          Is it exciting for you to do something a little bit different?”

Cozzi              “Part of the reason for Cesium to join Bentley was that I was excited to combine iTwin and Cesium and to operate at the scale and the reach that Bentley has earned. We want to focus on where we can create the most value, and then we want to interoperate with solutions from other organizations, to empower our users and empower developers to build with best-in-class solutions .

“An example of what we’ll be working on is how do we get the tiles and the iModel from iTwin, and then bring that into Cesium. I haven’t been writing code directly for many years; I have been involved in a lot of design, platform architecture, as well as the design for the open standards. But I’m looking forward to being a bit more technically involved now with Bentley than I was because we need to figure out a lot of details for this Cesium and iTwin collaboration.”

A Collaboration

Schrock          “Cesium sprang from the aerospace sector, as you explained in your keynote. Was there a moment where you thought, as an idealist, that the infrastructure sector could benefit from this? Or that it represented boundless opportunity? Or a little of both?”

Cozzi              “Certainly, going back to 2016 when we first met with Bentley Systems, they were showing us that Cesium was great for putting that infrastructure in the geospatial context. And also great for infrastructure at scale, a very detailed model where you want to stream it the same way that you want to stream the surrounding terrain.

“It was really in the last maybe two or three years that we started getting an even stronger message from our community, where we just watched what they were building. Most of the applications were combining natural and built environments. So, even independent of joining them, Cesium was going farther and farther down the path of adding features for the built environment.”

Openness

Schrock          “Cesium’s commitment to open standards and formats is well known, as is Bentley’s. I remember when Kieth Bentley, founder and former Chief Technology Officer, announced the opening of the iModel.js library, and now there is the iTwin.js library. Earlier today, the current Bentley CEO Nicholas Cummins dedicated a substantial portion of his keynote to openness.

“A question I hear a lot though when it comes to openness, is how can you grow a business if so much is “given away”?”

Cozzi              “There’s lots of ways to sustain and scale business with openness; open source and open standards. We’ve used open-source software to build trust, so the community will help guide us—that’s one form of mutually beneficial openness. The other thing you hear a lot about is open standards. That is the conduit that allows interoperability to connect the ecosystems. And then, of course, open APIs that allow software developers to connect everything.

“Users benefit from openness, and we’re all about supporting the user. It has become almost a requirement to be open. When you’re doing widely utilized open source and open standards, you’re leading the way. It does give you opportunities to build the best products that then interoperate with those standards.

“The way that we ran Cesium was we did all the open-source runtime engines, and all open standards to move the data back and forth. And then we had an additional cloud platform, Cesium ion, which is a subscription service where you can monetize it. We weren’t locking anybody out of developing. We offer them a nice option to pay for the extras, how to get the streaming with entrepreneurship.”

What Will, and Will Not Change

Schrock          “I was about to ask about that. Will there be any significant changes ahead for the current Cesium end-user community? Some folks, understandably, get nervous when they hear about acquisitions.”

Cozzi              “Cesium will remain the amenity that it already is, we don’t have to redevelop it. It’s a fair price, where you feel that you’re getting big value for it, and we feel that we’ve done a great job on its technical merits. The feedback from the folks is that it’s not a big cost. They’re surprised it doesn’t cost more. So, it will continue under the same model as Cesium ion, just under the umbrella of Bentley.”

Cozzi              “I just want to reiterate the way that we’re going to move iTwin and Cesium forward together is this engagement with the community, looking at the success of the collective ecosystem. And then being very open; open source, open standards, and open APIs—we need everyone’s help in driving the direction.”

Trends in the Digitization of Infrastructure

Schrock          “It is a reality in the world of infrastructure design, construction, and operations that there are multiple brands of tools and solutions employed in any given project. No single proprietary environment is practical to use anymore. The rise of open source and open standards has boomed in this sector. Having even one closed element in the loop can clog a project’s arteries.

“How do you see trends in open source, standards, and data playing out in the infrastructure sector?”

Cozzi              “There’s a lot of fantastic open-source projects that are being developed and utilized. I think we’re advancing open standards pretty well in a collaborative way. And that we’re doing it in a pragmatic way to meet real use cases, as opposed to just writing documents where we can have software implementations.

“I would love to see more on the open data side. When you look at what has propelled Cesium forward, as I touched on in the keynote, are the data acquisition trends. Where people are just collecting massive amounts of LiDAR and imagery data. It’s becoming easier and easier. There’s also more and more open data available. For example, there’s Open Street Maps, there’s the Overture Maps Foundation. Most city and state governments tend to have open data portals. I think there’s so much more we can do to make that data more consistently accessible, so maybe that’s part of open standards as well.”

Schrock          “Open data, it’s tough because collecting the data can represent quite a large investment, and then you’ve got to monetize a little bit. Even a public entity wants to recoup a little. But then again, mass data capture per unit is getting to be much more affordable.”

Cozzi              “True, there is lots of work ahead in finding ways to incentivize making that data open. There are not that many public entities that say: ‘Here’s a pile of money, make that free.’ There are though, examples of public/private partnerships that show promise.”

Blue Sky

Schrock          “I like to ask a certain hypothetical question about this new wave of immersive 3D environments for infrastructure. Say that someone is going to design a new residential or commercial development or campus. They then zoom in on the proposed site in a rich 3D globe, and it begins listing all of the free and for-fee datasets that are available for that area. They pick those that are applicable, and then they can begin designing, with advanced design software tools, directly into that environment. Rules-based engineering and elements of generative AI can help them along.”

Cozzi              “I think bringing that together into that one experience, decoding all of that data, making it very easily searchable for what you want, and then coordinating and geo-referencing is certainly doable. There’s work to be done there and integration to be done. But that vision is not science fiction, it’s just a matter of time. Well, 20 years ago, it was sci-fi, but now it’s within reach.”

Appetite for 3D

Schrock          “People are now much more comfortable being in a 3D environment, have much more of an appetite for and are, in many instances, demanding it. People who have played massive multiplayer online (MMO) games, with full 3D avatars, and watch movies with fabulous CGI.

“However, one challenge facing the acceptance of 3D environments for infrastructure is that people look at it and think: ‘That looks like 1980s CGI, the tops of those meshed modeled buildings look like melted ice cream.’ They fail to recognize the practical limitations. It’s unfair to compare a model for a digital city with a 2-hour movie that had a CGI budget of say $100M. Are there improvements ahead?”

Cozzi              “If you watched the 2024 Olympics coverage on NBC, you could see how realistic we were able to present a digital model of Paris for the broadcast. There are exciting trends in graphics processing units (GPU), memory, bandwidth, and more computing capabilities all the time.

“To achieve that richness requires more data. And fortunately, we’re seeing a flood of data acquired. It’s not just aircraft, its drones, street-level capture, and more, in higher and higher resolution. You can get a few millimeters resolution with reality capture devices, just walking down the street. What I think is an interesting driver is that end users keep expecting this higher and higher fidelity. And I think we’re going to keep giving them the best available with the current generation of technology.

“There is a huge appetite for continued, very high-resolution geospatial content. LIDAR point clouds, used to be a bit abstract, and it would take a trained eye to make sense of them, like reading tea leaves. Now, I’ve seen examples of how developers are beginning to be able to get Gaussian splat-quality visualizations out of processed point clouds. That kind of thing is going to be great.”

Schrock          “An exhibit at this event was the iTwin Experience, with examples of a single pane immersive interface for 3D models and data. I remember one of the first demonstrations I saw of this several years ago leveraged Cesium. That demonstration sparked the Blue-Sky question before. Is Cesium going to be further leveraged for iTwin in this manner?”

Cozzi              “Cesium can be embedded in all of these applications. So, imagine a future when you look at the Bentley applications, you might start at that globe, and you can zoom into your site or potentially another site.

“And think about continuous updates to digital twins. During my address, I mentioned our work for the digital transformation of construction worksites. There’s a joint venture called EARTHBRAIN, between Komatsu, Sony, NTT, and NRI. These four companies came together with a vision for smart construction sites, but the way they acquired data for the terrain of the construction site is occasional drone surveys and traditional GNSS rover surveys. However, there is also GPS on heavy equipment, including machine-controlled equipment; they are now essentially collecting partial updates throughout the day.

“Then you can glue this all together. In machine control, for instance, on a dozer or grader, you get the position and orientation of the blade and feed it back automatically. Their goal is to have a fairly continuous update of their construction site, to be able to track progress, movement of materials, and monitor safety.

“A great example was demonstrated earlier today at this event. During the keynote, Bentley’s Greg Demchak demonstrated Advanced Visualization. That was built on Cesium for Unreal Engine. And then it brought in the Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles, then tiles from iTwin for the built environment from a construction site. Then it showed construction progress in real time. In another example, one of our customers was able to bring their iModel of a bridge project they are working on, into the iTwin environment, live.”

Schrock          “Much geo-coolness ahead. Thank you, Patrick!”