In scanning through LinkedIn today I noticed a fun diversion that combined places I love from around the world, and ESRI ArcGIS. Yes, all those in a fun web diversion where you can fly around the mapped terrains in your browser.
I flew around where I live and hike in Central Oregon near Bend Oregon.
World Sky Tour https://ceddc.ch/arcgisworldskytour/
The LinkedIn Post from an ESRI Solution Architect Cédric Despierre Corporon
https://lnkd.in/p/gTinj5ND
“I built a custom web app where you can fly a tiny plane with ArcGIS, literally anywhere in the world. ✈️🌍A month ago I released Sky Tour Switzerland : a side project resulting from multiple tech experiments with 3D on the Web. Since then I kept working on it, got some good feedback that helped me improve the app, fixed quite a few technical things and I learned a lot. At some point I thought: it’s working in Switzerland, so why not just make it work everywhere?
With World Sky Tour, pick a place you like, or somewhere you’ve never seen, and fly a tiny plane (that you control/drive/fly) around in a 3D WebScene. Some places looks much better than others of course, especially where there is good high-resolution imagery and precise elevation data.
It is built with the ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript and Esri Living Atlas services for World Imagery, Elevation and Buildings, plus some custom GeoParquet with OSM data for the labels.
With AI, I think we are in a similar place to where we were with computers in the early 90s or the web in the early 2000s. Things are moving quickly, the tools can still be a bit strange, and it is difficult to keep up with what is possible and what are “best practices”. Today it goes even faster and it’s quite difficult to predict what will be possible in a few months.
At the same time, for around $20 a month, you can already get access to “frontier models” and Desktop/CLI tools like ChatGPT or Claude and experiment with things that would have been difficult, expensive or simply too time-consuming for most people just a few years ago : that’s the world we live in now.I think the best way to prepare is simply to start experimenting early. Use these tools regularly, try to automate different workflows or build a fun side project, and learn how to become more efficient with them. They are becoming part of our everyday work and life ☺️
Try the app here : https://lnkd.in/d3eYQW3Y (you can fly with the joytick on touchscreen or keyboard or game controller)
As I did not visit all the places by myself, if you know in your country a nice/”better view” starting point please sent it to me, you can share the url 🙂
C’est aussi traduit en Français und auch ins Deutsche übersetzt,
e in italiano, y en español 🙂(I am also finishing building the plane logic as an open-source esri web component that can be added to ArcGIS WebScenes. I should publish it in the next two weeks.)”
