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by geo-matik 1417 days ago
Indeed, the ArcGIS Maps SDK is about GIS content first and foremost, not CAD content that almost always lacks geolocation. It's a bit disappointing from HN that the top comment, while containing valid information, is only remotely applicable to the tool at hand.
1 comments

I hear ya, but I also think it's so cool that these tools are finally intersecting! GIS has come a long way in the last decade or so, along with drone photogrammetry, while UE and Unity continued to mature alongside GPUs. We're finally at a point where this sort of thing is not just conceivable, but even doable on a typical mid to high end gaming computer at home, using largely open tools (like QGIS, public GIS data from the city/county/state/federal agencies, the open drone photogrammetry toolkit whose name escapes me at the moment) alongside home/indie pricing for the big commercial tools (UE, Unity, Arc, ESRI APIs).

We're finally at a place where that convergence is happening. As someone who grew up a gamer, went into the natural sciences, then web dev, it used to be hard to find overlaps in these fields. Then gradually the professionals in each started realizing their shared need for geospatial data, QGIS really took off, Leaflet and Openlayers got really good, WebGL matured... Anyway blah blah blah it's a perfect storm of many technologies finally getting cheap and easy enough to use.

I can't wait to see what people make.