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ARGUS User Manual

Cesium 3D mode

The cesium3d mode is the most capable of the three map modes. It renders a full Cesium globe with Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles as the base imagery, OSM Buildings as a lit overlay, and the complete Cesium feature surface — terrain lighting, sky + atmosphere, measurement, sensor fusion, Panoptic, and the tactical-hologram effect.

Switch into it by cycling the globe icon in the tile toolbar.

Base imagery

Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles (Cesium Ion asset 2275207) is the primary tileset. Cache budget is 2 GB per session so moving the camera around doesn’t churn tiles aggressively. On failure (tile endpoint unreachable, quota exceeded, network fault) the viewer falls back automatically to Bing satellite imagery + OpenStreetMap basemap and prints a console warning. The fallback is transparent to the user.

OSM Buildings overlay

A separate Cesium 3D Tileset is rendered on top of the Google Photoreal imagery, showing OSM Buildings in their extruded form. In standard mode they render with realistic lighting; in tactical hologram mode they’re re-shaded with a custom Fresnel-edge fragment shader that gives them a cyan glowing outline.

Toggle OSM Buildings on/off from the Layers sidebar. Useful when you want a cleaner planning view without building geometry obscuring polygon draws.

Mouse

InputAction
Left-click + dragPan along the ground plane
Right-click + dragRotate / orbit
Middle-click + dragTilt
Scroll wheelZoom

Left-click as pan is an ARGUS override of Cesium’s default behaviour (which is rotate on left-click). This matches Google Maps muscle memory and is what operators coming from 2D planning expect.

Keyboard

No navigation shortcuts are wired up — all camera control is mouse-driven. The Home / focus region action is available from the tile toolbar instead; it recenters on the mission’s venue-bounded region.

Camera follow

Click the drone icon in the tile toolbar to lock the camera to the selected drone. See Map overview → Camera follow.

Measurement tools

Cesium 3D is the only mode with measurement. Open the measurement menu from the tile toolbar and pick one of four modes:

Ruler

Click two points. The tool computes the great-circle distance and bearing between them, formatted in both metric and imperial. Auto-completes after the second point — you don’t have to double-click.

Path

Multi-segment. Click each waypoint in order. Double-click to finalise. The panel shows per-segment distances + cumulative total. Great for logging a foot route or a planned vehicle path.

Area

Click vertices around a polygon. Double-click to close. Area is computed via Girard’s theorem for spherical excess — accurate over large regions, not just a flat-Earth approximation. Result is in m², hectares, and km².

Elevation

Single-click on any point. Returns the terrain elevation at that lat/lng. Useful for LOS checks when planning drone altitudes.

Persistence

Measurements are purely ephemeral. Closing the measurement menu discards the result. Switching map modes also discards. There’s no save-as-flag shortcut — if you want the coordinate preserved, drop a flag at the point manually, then re-measure.

Entity clamping

Entities that don’t carry explicit altitude data are clamped to the terrain so they sit flush with the ground rather than float or bury:

  • Flags — clamped (their pin icon is rendered as a billboard, so always visible).
  • Polygon edges — clamped (the polygon fill is drawn draped over whatever terrain lies underneath).
  • VMS cone footprints — clamped.

Entities with explicit altitude (drones, docks in the air, flight-task waypoints) use their GPS altitude and are not clamped. This keeps a landed drone on the dock and a flying drone in the air where it actually is.

Sky + atmosphere

The rendered scene includes:

  • Sky — sun position, stars at night, cloud layer (Cesium’s default atmospheric shell).
  • Fog — distance fog at the horizon for a natural fall-off.
  • Lighting — directional sunlight with shadows (expensive — disable from the Layers sidebar if you’re GPU-constrained).

Tactical hologram mode disables all three and replaces them with a dark void + cyan vector roads.

Sensor fusion layers

In cesium3d the FUSION tab of the Layers sidebar reveals three independent overlay toggles:

  • Coverage grid — tracks which ground cells the selected drone’s camera has actually seen. See Sensor fusion for details.
  • Detection density — heatmap of object detections accumulated over time.
  • Thermal mosaic — when the drone is in FLIR mode, a synthetic thermal image drapes onto the coverage footprint.

These are drone-centric — AIS / ADS-B external feeds are not part of sensor fusion; they live under Panoptic.

Performance tuning

The current build doesn’t expose a user-facing quality slider. Performance tuning is done server-side via Cesium configuration:

  • maximumScreenSpaceError defaults to ~16-28 depending on camera motion — higher error = lower tile detail.
  • Motion-adaptive SSE: when you pan or rotate quickly, SSE relaxes to keep the frame rate up; it snaps back to full detail when the camera is still.
  • FXAA anti-aliasing is always on (Cesium default).
  • 2 GB tile cache so panning around doesn’t hammer the Photoreal endpoint.

If you hit FPS problems, first try:

  1. Toggle OSM Buildings off from Layers.
  2. Toggle Sky + atmosphere off.
  3. Switch to Tactical hologram — much lighter GPU cost.

Known limitations

  • No keyboard navigation. Camera is mouse-only; no WASD orbit.
  • Measurement is ephemeral. No save button, no export.
  • No vertex-level polygon editing in Cesium. Polygon draws happen in 2D; switching to Cesium renders them but editing is not supported yet.