In Esri’s case, they took the task extremely seriously, saying they started the process of working on these SDKs in 2019, ensuring maximum ease of use in working with real-world data in these game engines.

While these engines were obviously built for the purposes of gaming experiences at the outset, recent years have seen a number of industries start to utilize these kinds of technologies into their own use cases. Both are available as a free download for users with an ArcGIS Developer or ArcGIS Online account. That would be Esri, who recently launched an ArcGIS Maps SDK for both Unity and Unreal Engine. Recently, perhaps the biggest name has announced new software development kits (SDKs) with two of the biggest names in gaming engines. That, along with the growing speculation and building of the metaverse, in which geospatial professionals figure to play a central role, has created an unlikely bridge between the GIS and gaming industries, with the latter’s 3D technology increasingly being involved in the GIS world. Over the last couple of decades, and more emphatically over the last five to ten years, we’ve seen a rapid development in 3D technology in the GIS world, with better quality than ever before.

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