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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

As early as 10th grade I remember asking my GIS teacher, "why is ArcGIS so sluggish and aliased but in my 3d animation class the viewports are antialiased and smooth like butter?" (I didn't use these words but they're what I meant to say)

I've been a bit obsessed with interdisciplinary mashups ever since. Robotics, for example, badly badly needs to stop writing their own tools and use a ton more of what already exists in GIS. And the disciplines of geography need to do the same with the amazing vector and raster tools out there as well.

It's really awesome seeing Blender used as a GIS view.

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I want the doppler weather radar data with its height slices cast over a 3d topo map of the terrain. We can sometimes see the effects of terrain on weather in the real, but zooming out and having perspectives of real recorded data would be entrancing to watch... i'm sure there's a lot to be learned form such things to but i just want to see it better.

This seems like something ideal for development by NOAA/NWS, with the resulting code operationalized as part of weather.gov and also released on Github.

The 3D animation software used by TV news weather departments can do all of the above, as far back as 2000, so it should be possible to replicate in a more open way.

An interdisciplinary mashup I’m curious about is using videogame engines (e.g. Unreal) for quality real-time 3D rendering responding to e.g. audio signal (music) or motion, and creating cool art installations / live performances based on that.

I recently saw this mock up of a DE done in Unity[0]. Maybe not the best use case but interesting nonetheless.

I've long dreamt of putting together an intuitive CAD tool equivalent to SketchUp in Unity.i think it's probably doable.

[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/ey5eta/i_made_an_o...

On a smaller scale, this is def. a thing that's coming. Take the OP-Z for example, which has a dedicated Unity engine track (in addition to sample, synth, MIDI, FX, performance and even DMX).

Realtime ray tracing (see e.g. NVIDIA iRay) is being patched into many realtime 3D systems at the moment, and I suspect will become more popular for projection mapping art installations this year.

Eevee is quite interesting. The performance isn't quite there yet when compared with Unreal, but it is built directly into Blender.

check out the work of keijiro takahashi: https://www.keijiro.tokyo/

Notch is used for art installations and live performances (Rammstein, Billie Eilish, etc) as stage shows rendered in real time. It started as a tool to make graphics demos, so pretty close to a video game engine.

https://www.notch.one/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaEoAJw_0Zc

This has been done in various forms for a very long time. Winamp visualizations were common back in the day. Look at Touch Designer if you want to see one of the ways large concert panels are driven.

I know about Touch Designer, but it is not a game engine and to my knowledge does not really specialize in fully real-time high-resolution detailed 3D rendering.

That's basically how all technological and science progress works. You take a few existing dots and connect them together. Connecting dots between fields that are further apart is less common and often has more impact.

Sidenote, but people actually take GIS classes? Even in high school? Never heard of such a thing.

As someone that does GIS related work professionally, that caught me by surprise.

I got into GIS because my public high school happened to be a "GIS magnet school." Turned out that was basically the only thing I actually felt interested in actually doing well in.

My university had a geography program where I focused on GIS and remote sensing among other minor focuses (you really have to be multidisciplinary in geography). By the time I finished my Master's they had a dedicated Geomatics program which was a lot more GIS heavy.

Hope that answers your question.

I had a couple GIS courses in University, along with a few mapping and survey courses. We also used arcGIS extensively for different projects in other courses and for our year long research project. I had never heard of GIS in high school though.

There are entire master's degrees in 'GIS', which are essentially a whole year of learning how to use ArcGIS, from different points of view.

The amount of academic capture by Esri is crazy. Though to their credit my profs forced us to use QGIS a lot and learn enough Python to write our own workflows both in QGIS and model builder. I'd say most students still just became GIS button pushers but some definitely broke out of that capture and began making their own tools.

On the other hand there are people like me - where GIS course at university was basically "setup a postgres DB, load test data, add a feature in qgis" - and in professional work i had to probably re-discover everything.

If someone with proper education in the field would look at my topology checking code, they would die a bit inside.

My databases course was like that too. I think a lot of the point was just exposure to the principles and technologies.

As a software developer that has never had any GIS classes, what is the best way to get started in this?

Every time I see something as cool as this I want to learn it and find some way to apply it and create something cool, but I never seem to find a project that I can dive into or be able to apply it in real world. (But I'm sure this is because my surroundings just aren't interested in it)

I honestly just sort of fell into a job where it was relevant. I don't know that there is anything inherently interesting about it. It's mostly just lat/lon coordinates and putting stuff on maps.

Same for programming IDEs. My old P2 350 could compute real time simulation of soft body over Nurbs but doing anything in Eclipse took 5 seconds. Does not compute.

Disclaimer: work for Esri.

ArcGIS Pro has had a GPU accelerated 3D mode for a long time now. Panning, zooming, mouselook, flythrough, etc are 30fps+ on commodity hardware.

Talking about interdisciplinary mashup, would be great if there is a gallery to show-case people the beauty of "crossing the dimension"

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