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ARGUS User Manual

Photorealistic 3D tiles

The cesium3d mode uses Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles as its primary imagery layer. These are the same tiles that power Google Earth — photogrammetric buildings, trees, vehicles, and terrain stitched from aerial and satellite imagery.

This page is about the Photoreal tileset specifically. For the Cesium mode as a whole, see Cesium 3D.

How it’s loaded

  • Cesium Ion asset id: 2275207.
  • Streamed on demand as you pan/zoom — only tiles within the frustum download.
  • Session tile cache: 2 GB. This prevents eviction storms during heavy panning in a single session.
  • Fallback: if the tileset fails to load (auth error, quota hit, endpoint down), the viewer swaps to Bing satellite + OpenStreetMap as imagery and keeps going. The switch is seamless; the only signal is a console-warning log line.

What you see

  • City-scale photogrammetry — buildings as full volumetric meshes, not extruded polygons.
  • Trees, vehicles, fences as baked-in geometry.
  • Terrain with baked-in lighting (pre-computed ambient occlusion in the tiles themselves).

What renders on top

The Photoreal tileset is just the base. ARGUS draws over it:

  • OSM Buildings overlay (toggleable) — a simpler extruded-polygon tileset that adds labels + building-attribute data Photoreal doesn’t carry.
  • Sky + atmosphere (toggleable).
  • All mission overlays — drones, docks, flags, polygons, Panoptic feeds, sensor fusion layers.

Performance considerations

Photoreal is the heaviest imagery. On modest GPUs you’ll notice:

  • Higher memory use — the 2 GB cache is aggressive by design to avoid re-downloading tiles during normal panning.
  • Higher GPU load — the photogrammetric mesh is dense compared to Google Earth 3D.
  • Network cost — first-time entry into a region downloads many tiles.

What’s actually tunable

The current build does not expose a user-facing quality slider. These are the knobs, applied behind the scenes by the Cesium viewer:

  • maximumScreenSpaceError — how aggressively Cesium demands high-detail tiles. ARGUS ships with a motion-adaptive value: relaxed during camera motion (higher SSE = lower detail, higher FPS), tightened when the camera rests (lower SSE = higher detail).
  • Frustum culling — only in-view tiles load. Pans outside the current view stream in their tiles in the background.
  • Session cache size — 2 GB.

What’s not exposed

  • No FXAA / MSAA toggle. FXAA is always on (Cesium default).
  • No foveated rendering. The code doesn’t implement per-pixel quality reduction by gaze direction.
  • No resolution-scale slider. Cesium renders at the device’s natural DPI; no “render at 50 %” knob.

If the tile is unusable on your hardware, your best workarounds in priority order are:

  1. Toggle OSM Buildings off from the Layers sidebar.
  2. Toggle Sky + Atmosphere off.
  3. Switch to Tactical hologram — dramatically lighter load.
  4. Fall back to 3d mode (Google Earth 3D) — still photogrammetric but lighter than Photoreal.
  5. Fall back to 2d — cheapest mode.

Billing

Google Photoreal tiles are metered by Google. Your org’s monthly usage is visible under Admin → Organisation → Usage. Heavy operator panning during long operations accumulates tile requests fast — tens of thousands per hour in dense urban scenarios. Prefer 2d for route-planning phases, switch to cesium3d only when you need volumetric context.

Known limitations

  • Indoor geometry leakage. Photoreal sometimes contains photogrammetric reconstructions of plazas or courtyards that appear underground. Rarely — but when it happens, the clipping tools in the measurement menu can hide the artefact. There’s no one-click “clean indoors” toggle yet.
  • Stale imagery. Google updates Photoreal tiles on their own schedule. If a building was demolished last month it may still appear. Use Panoptic + flag overlays to annotate mismatches.
  • Attribution. Google requires the “Google” attribution to remain visible on-screen. ARGUS respects this automatically.