Written by Dong, 2021 Cohort
A couple of weeks ago, I got my assistant level engineering license of geographical information mapping authorized by the Chinese government. This is just the first step before I become a senior engineer which might take me over 15 years in total. It is essential for a person who wants to run an industrial-related company or to get higher positions in a Land Department or other state-owned organizations in China. Actually, I have worked for a geographical information company for almost two years as a part time job, so when I held this license in hand for the first time, I felt lucky and relieved.
In the past, most work for me was contour line drawing, like drawing terrain and the facade in different coordinates for governmental surveying purposes. Sometimes, we were so lucky to get a high-resolution picture containing coordinate information that we could draw it in line with them, or else we had to get the first-hand date through previous field investigations and draw them from a blank space in computers. It’s not easy for beginners to accomplish such a task from operating a heavy and complex machine (Electronic Total Station) to using different drawing software (CAD), and more and more customers have made higher demands with the development of technologies.
What struck me last year were UAV mapping and ESRI ArcGIS pro, which could lower the labor cost to some degree. I took the ArcGIS pro training as a pioneer in my city around May 2021, and when I searched for workshop resources on campuses during the summer vacation, I found it was so trendy among British Columbia’s universities that both UBC and SFU had provided a series of ArcGIS pro courses. I drew the conclusion that ArcGIS pro is quite a potent tool and knowing how to operate with it will become a basic skill for most students in the near future. Nonetheless, what can ArcGIS pro, the world leading GIS software, do for us?
ArcGIS pro is evolved from the previous version -ArcGIS, and ESRI said ArcGIS pro would replace ArcGIS sooner or later at the Users’ Conference in 2017. ArcGIS pro supports data visualization; advanced analysis; and authoritative data maintenance in 2D, 3D, and 4D. In the industry, engineers can edit geographical data(especially for 3D maps) into different formats here and analyze them through mainstream programming languages. For instance, based on DSM generated by a UAV, it can build 3D analytics models which are able to simulate the effect of the slope in a landfill. In academia (like UBC and SFU), researchers would like to use it to tell a story for enhancing how to communicate their research to diverse audiences. For example, during the pandemic, a team in the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University used different colours that are dark or shallow to highlight high risk areas in Vancouver. They also created interactive maps to indicate the relative risk of COVID-19 transmission (based on the types of activities that happen within certain types of places in a neighbourhood).
As we can see, the industry cares more about accuracy and authenticity of data, and they probably will do a lot of groundwork to collect the vast amount of it. They seldom use visualized ways to do story-telling things, which is more favoured by the researchers. I think maybe they use it for single tasks and their reports are often required to be rendered in text documents. But I believe that Metaverse has been accepted by many governors in the past 2021, and there are some possibilities that we could build a visual 3D world through UAV tilt and vertical photogrammetry and invite people to attend a VR presentation by telling well-organized stories and showing those geographical motions here. This will be a brand new way to connect the real and digital world, and I am planning to make it come true in my next project.