On Christmas Eve, excited children—and the merely curious—can track Santa Claus’ sleigh across the skies thanks to NORAD’s famous Santa tracker. It’s one of the best-known public-facing applications of Cesium, Bentley Systems’ geospatial technology, which can stream massive datasets, render them in 3D, and deliver them to anyone, anywhere, on any device.
In 2025, Santa’s journey caps a year of great Cesium 3D visualizations from around the world, including immersive tours of Berlin, Barcelona, the Netherlands, and Belém, Brazil, this year’s host city for the UN Climate Change Conference. Cesium is also helping a professor in Japan to create interactive records of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Keep reading to learn more about the projects—and to experience for yourself how Cesium lets you experience history, explore landmarks, and marvel at ingenious infrastructure old and new.
Using 3D Tech to Redefine How We Experience History
University of Tokyo professor Hidenori Watanave has spent two decades creating interactive, explorable records of global conflicts, including the World War II atomic bombings of Japan. With a few clicks, you can walk through Hiroshima and see images of the city as it was. You can also watch video accounts of the bombing directly from survivors. The experience is seamless, and the result is an immediacy that textbooks can’t provide. “If we connect the past to the present through technology, people can truly experience history,” Watanave says. The digital archivist and his students have also mapped destruction in Ukraine during Russia’s invasion, and the same methods have been applied to earthquakes in Turkey and flooding in Japan.
Berlin: Resilient Infrastructure Through a Digital 3D Tour
Aerial view of Berlin’s Siegessäule (Victory Column).Berlin boasts numerous landmarks that showcase its engineering resilience and capacity for reinvention, and our interactive 3D tour takes you up close to some of the German capital’s most iconic spots. Your first stop is Siemensstadt Square, where Bentley is helping German tech giant Siemens effectively build a city district twice—first in a digital 3D model, then in bricks, steel, and streets. From there, swoop past the iconic Brandenburg Gate, slip through a revitalized Potsdamer Platz, and zoom by the glass-roofed Hauptbahnhof. Immerse yourself in our Berlin 3D tour—it’s the next best thing to being there!
A 3D Tour of COP30’s Host City of Belém
Aerial view of Forte do Castelo in Belém, Brazil, showing historic buildings, green gardens, surrounding city streets, and the waterfront along the river.The world’s largest climate summit, the UN Climate Change Conference (COP30), headed to the Amazon in 2025—and into the heart of the climate crisis. The event was held in Belém, a vibrant tropical port city in Brazil, and the gateway to Earth’s largest rainforest. (Bentley and Seequent, the Bentley subsurface company, co-hosted multiple sessions at COP30 exploring how digital innovation can accelerate climate adaptation and sustainable growth.) Take our 3D tour of COP30’s host city to see how Belém is balancing climate adaptation, cultural heritage, and the economy. The immersive experience lets viewers explore Belém’s vibrant markets, cultural landmarks, and flood-resilient neighborhoods. One stop on the tour is COP30’s main venue, Parque da Cidade, a new 500,000-square-meter complex that includes landscaped green areas, theaters, a library, and an interfaith temple. After the summit, the park reopened as a public landmark, a legacy of sustainable design and inclusive urban renewal.
The Netherlands in 3D, Like You’ve Never Seen It
Aerial 3D view of Amsterdam Centraal railway station in the Netherlands, surrounded by water, roads, nearby buildings, and modern high-rises in the background.In October, Amsterdam hosted Bentley’s Year In Infrastructure (YII) and Going Digital Awards, an event dubbed the “Oscars of Infrastructure.” Ahead of YII, we built an interactive map using Cesium to explore the Netherlands’ incredible infrastructure and heritage. Swoop over examples of the Dutch engineering genius that keeps the country safe and dry, like the massive storm surge barrier protecting the country from the North Sea. Also enjoy a bird’s-eye view of Dutch cultural gems, like the star-shaped village of Bourtange, whose network of canals and moats made it a nearly impregnable fortress in the 16th century. Now that’s resilient infrastructure.
A 3D Architectural Tour of Barcelona’s Most Iconic Shapes
Aerial view of the Camp Nou football stadium in Barcelona, surrounded by city buildings and streets, with information about the stadium displayed on the left side of the image.Barcelona has long challenged convention in architecture and urban design, from the jagged columns of La Sagrada Familia to the octagonal intersections of the Eixample. And it’s still pushing the envelope: These days, the city is reimagining itself as a patchwork of pedestrian-first zones, prioritizing green space over cars and concrete. No wonder, then, that Spain’s second-largest city was a fitting backdrop this July for Illuminate Barcelona, Bentley’s exclusive gathering of infrastructure, engineering, and design leaders. If you missed it, you can still explore the city thanks to our immersive 3D tour, powered by Cesium. The virtual tour takes you from the shimmering, sail-shaped W Hotel, where Illuminate Barcelona took place, to the city’s architectural and urban planning marvels—and beyond.
