Esri’s embrace of 3D Tiles marks new chapter for open geospatial standards

At its 2025 Partner Conference, Esri announced that Google’s photorealistic 3D Tiles will be integrated into the ArcGIS ecosystem. Besides being a technical enhancement, this signals Esri’s continued commitment to open standards and interoperability – an increasingly important shift in the broader tech landscape.

The integration builds on the momentum from 2023, when ArcGIS first adopted the 3D Tiles standard. Since then, 3D capabilities within the platform have rapidly expanded, with growing adoption across Esri’s user community. Now, with access to high-resolution, real-world 3D content covering more than 2,500 cities in 49 countries, users in fields such as intelligence, defence, public safety and humanitarian aid can unlock new insights and bring next-generation visualization and analysis workflows to life.

Evolving geospatial landscape

The geospatial landscape is evolving rapidly, and with it, the expectations placed on data. Today’s users don’t just demand accuracy – they need data that’s accessible, interoperable, and ready to drive decision-making across disciplines. As industries move toward more dynamic, integrated systems, the value of open standards has never been clearer.

Esri’s decision to adopt 3D Tiles reflects this shift. By supporting a shared, community-based approach to streaming and sharing 3D geospatial content, Esri is strengthening the foundation for next-generation workflows. The result is a more consistent user experience, improved situational awareness, and faster innovation – particularly in sectors that depend on spatial data, such as urban planning, infrastructure development, defence, and public safety.

This momentum also underscores a broader industry realization: open standards are no longer an idealistic aspiration – they are a practical necessity for scaling capabilities in fields like artificial intelligence, simulation, emergency response, and sustainable city design.

Handling complex 3D data

3D Tiles is designed to make complex 3D geospatial data easier to share, visualize and use. In the past, a drone-captured 3D scan of a construction site might have been too large and cumbersome to be used efficiently. Today, that same dataset can be streamed and analysed in near real time, and integrated with global geospatial layers for richer context. This unlocks safer worksites, more accurate planning, and better cost control.

This transformation is already delivering results across industries. Construction firms, for example, are using 3D Tiles to stream high-resolution photogrammetry captured by drones, allowing teams to coordinate and track progress with unprecedented precision. In engineering, companies like Pennoni are leveraging the format to embed infrastructure projects within their real-world geographic surroundings, making proposals easier to understand and approve. In the realm of public safety, Lockheed Martin has applied 3D Tiles in a wildfire monitoring platform that blends real-time sensor data with AI analysis and 3D visualization, enabling faster, more informed responses.

A decade of 3D Tiles

Originally introduced in 2015 by Cesium (now part of Bentley Systems), 3D Tiles was created to solve a growing problem: how to stream and interact with increasingly large and diverse 3D geospatial datasets. Drawing on innovations from computer graphics, it offered a scalable solution for rendering photogrammetry, point clouds and city-scale models, without sacrificing performance or accuracy.

In 2019, 3D Tiles was formally adopted as an OGC Community Standard, opening the door to broader implementation. Since then, it has seen steady growth, with contributions from the open-source community, commercial developers, and platform providers alike. The standard now underpins a growing number of geospatial tools and environments, from Cesium and Unreal Engine to Google’s Photorealistic 3D Tiles, which launched in 2023. With Esri’s recent adoption, the ecosystem has gained another powerful advocate.

 “3D Tiles demonstrates how the OGC Community Standard process supports scalable, interoperable implementations. By aligning with real-world data and platform needs, it ensures that innovations developed by the community can integrate across diverse systems and power operational geospatial solutions at scale,” said Scott Simmons, chief standards officer, Open Geospatial Consortium.

The embrace of 3D Tiles by leading technology providers like Esri and Google affirms what the geospatial community has long promoted: that openness is not just an ethical stance, but a strategic one. Interoperability fosters innovation, reduces duplication, and ensures that new capabilities can be adopted widely and equitably. As more organizations follow suit, the benefits of open standards will continue to grow – fuelling smarter cities, faster emergency response and a deeper understanding of the world around us.