Konrad Wenzel and Juhan Yoon take us all on a tour of Cambridge using reality mapping and the new ArcGIS Reality suite of products.
ArcGIS Reality is a new suite of reality mapping products designed for creating foundational layers from imagery and serving workflows on multiple scales, using drone, aerial, and satellite imagery, elevating 2D GIS into a photorealistic 3D GIS experience.
Using ArcGIS Reality, a high-resolution 3D mesh digital twin of the City of Cambridge was created by working with aerial survey partner Bluesky International to collect approximately 30,000 images over the city. Leveraging the computing power of the cloud, more than 19TB of image data was processed in ArcGIS Reality Studio to create the mesh in a few days.
ArcGIS Reality is also available as an extension in ArcGIS Pro, leveraging the same powerful processing engine as ArcGIS Reality Studio and bringing it to the desktop experience. Using 3D information in ArcGIS Reality, a true orthomosiac can be developed, creating a pixel-perfect image ready for accurate change analysis.
The ability to process satellite imagery is coming soon to ArcGIS Reality for ArcGIS Pro, providing GIS professionals the ability to create a 3D mesh on demand and within only a few hours from when images were captured. A mesh over a location in Italy was created, using satellite images captured at 85cm resolution by partner BlackSky.
A higher resolution drone image capture at 7mm pixel resolution was added to the aerial mesh. Using ArcGIS Drone2Map and Site Scan for ArcGIS in the ArcGIS Reality product suite, images can be processed with the same quality results as ArcGIS Reality Studio and ArcGIS Reality for ArcGIS Pro and added to the mesh alongside GIS data to visualize and analyze with context. Imagery can be exported from a web scene into an immersive 360-degree VR experience to view on a mobile device or VR headset.