Cesium: View from the front of the tracked entity

Question

I need to achieve a front view for the tracking entity, which will change according to the entities movements.

When I assign a value to viewer.trackedEntity property, the camera assumes a certain position. Is it possible to change this position so that the camera is directly in front of the tracking entity?

How can I do this for this example?

var viewer = new Cesium.Viewer('cesiumContainer', {
    infoBox: false, 
    selectionIndicator: false,
    shouldAnimate: true, 
    terrainProvider: Cesium.createWorldTerrain()
});

var start = Cesium.JulianDate.fromDate(new Date(2015, 2, 25, 16));
var stop = Cesium.JulianDate.addSeconds(start, 360, new Cesium.JulianDate());

viewer.clock.startTime = start.clone();
viewer.clock.stopTime = stop.clone();
viewer.clock.currentTime = start.clone();
viewer.clock.clockRange = Cesium.ClockRange.LOOP_STOP;
viewer.clock.multiplier = 10;

viewer.timeline.zoomTo(start, stop);

var position = new Cesium.SampledPositionProperty();
position.addSample(start, Cesium.Cartesian3.fromDegrees(-118.243683, 34.052235, 500000));
position.addSample(Cesium.JulianDate.addSeconds(start, 250, new Cesium.JulianDate()), Cesium.Cartesian3.fromDegrees(-110, 35.5, 500000));
position.addSample(Cesium.JulianDate.addSeconds(start, 500, new Cesium.JulianDate()), Cesium.Cartesian3.fromDegrees(-86.134903, 40.267193, 500000));

var entity = viewer.entities.add({
    availability : new Cesium.TimeIntervalCollection([new Cesium.TimeInterval({
        start : start,
        stop : stop
    })]),
    position : position,
    orientation : new Cesium.VelocityOrientationProperty(position),
    model : {
        uri : 'https://cesiumjs.org/Cesium/Apps/SampleData/models/CesiumAir/Cesium_Air.gltf',
        minimumPixelSize : 64
    },
    path : {
        resolution : 1,
        material : new Cesium.PolylineGlowMaterialProperty({
            glowPower : 0.1,
            color : Cesium.Color.YELLOW
        }),
        width : 10
    }
});

viewer.trackedEntity = entity;

<link href="https://cesiumjs.org/Cesium/Build/Cesium/Widgets/widgets.css" rel="stylesheet"/>
<script src="https://cesiumjs.org/Cesium/Build/CesiumUnminified/Cesium.js"></script>

<style>
    @import url(../templates/bucket.css);
</style>
<div id="cesiumContainer" class="fullSize"></div>
<div id="loadingOverlay"><h1>Loading...</h1></div>
<div id="toolbar">
    <div id="interpolationMenu"></div>
</div>

Answer 1

When adding entities to a Cesium.Viewer you have one attribute in the entity, viewFrom, so by doing something like:

var entity = viewer.entities.add({
    availability : new Cesium.TimeIntervalCollection([new Cesium.TimeInterval({
        start : start,
        stop : stop
    })]),
    position : position,
    orientation : new Cesium.VelocityOrientationProperty(position),
    model : {
        uri : 
'https://cesiumjs.org/Cesium/Apps/SampleData/models/CesiumAir/Cesium_Air.gltf',
        minimumPixelSize : 64
    },
    path : {
        resolution : 1,
        material : new Cesium.PolylineGlowMaterialProperty({
            glowPower : 0.1,
            color : Cesium.Color.YELLOW
        }),
        width : 10
    },
    viewFrom: new Cesium.Cartesian3(30, 0, 0),
});

You could get the effect that you want, observe that the viewFrom is a Cartesian3 object, so if you want a frontal view where the plane YZ is visible, you should only set distance in the X axis. Disclaimer: As pointed out in the comments, this is a East-North-Up so XYZ depend on the orientation of the vehicle itself.

Must confess that the documentation for this is quite poor and there was even a bug about this behaviour.

But after a long discussion in their forum you could discover how it works