#Esri cityengine vr how to#
You see, there are windows for what the camera is seeing, what assets you have, what the settings for those assets are, what is in the game environment … and if I lost you at “what the camera is seeing” you aren’t alone! The first time I opened Unity I spent 10 minutes just figuring out how to add a simple dataset (or model, as it is called in Unity). Don’t get me wrong, it makes sense, perfect sense, but not so readily to a GIS user! If you were one of those people who winced at the number of toolbars in ArcGIS or held your head in your hands looking at QGIS, Unity is not for you. So enough of the issues with using geospatial data there are other problems that are more pressing that the casual GIS user needs to know. I long to see an amazing city demonstration just so I can ask the creator what datum they used or how accurate the model is. If you are using AR or MR, are you likely to be creating an environment over a few hundred metres? Probably not, though it is these things you’re not told when you see these super shiny interactive demonstrations. Of course, this can all be worked around as long as you are aware of the shortcomings. This makes for a more complex workflow for the geospatial user as coordinates and elevation need to be used with caution, as does the coordinate system and datum when working with data over 1km. With Unity, you may specify the units to be meters and have a plethora of options for adjusting scale and x,y,z orientation, though predominantly all around a single coordinate, the same way in which CAD works. Let me be a little more focused in this discussion and just talk about the most popular option, Unity. That isn’t to say that you can’t use geographic data in these systems, but more that they don’t use geographic data natively therefore, creating true geospatial representations aren’t quite as easy as you think they should be. To get the information into these systems, do you use a geospatial data format? No, the most efficient formats are the gaming 3D model formats, like FBX and Collada, which require the removal of all geographic information.
The most popular for this kind of development is Unity, though you can also do it with Unreal Engine, Blender, and directly with Windows UWP, IOs, Android, Webgl, and other systems. To develop an AR, MR, or VR app you will need a gaming engine. We must remember how people scoffed at 3D geospatial capability, and now it is supported in almost every GIS on the market.Įxperience over the last few months has made me question whether we are being too eager in our quest to be the first and point out why we are a fair way off the fully immersed lives we are being promised.Īugmented London using my laptop as a target There have even been a few QGIS integrations that export AR outputs … the GIS industry is slowly coming around to the fact that this technology is the future. They even have some AR and VR capability with their Runtime SDK, now. In the last few days, Esri, the world’s largest GIS supplier, has been demonstrating its VR export capability in CityEngine, the AUGeo app that converts your ArcGIS Online data into AR on your mobile.
I can confirm this as I’ve created a few AR apps and MR apps myself over the last few months, with no experience with the technology and almost no scripting knowledge. Over the last few years, altered realities technology has exploded, and now, with the introduction of Apple’s ARKit and Android’s ARCore, AR, MR, and VR are well within the reach of the non-developer.
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