the story
In 2022, my colleague Jeffrey Scarmazzi and I presented a talk called "Leveling Up as a Unity 3D Developer" @ Esri Developer Summit 2022. Our goal was to share what we had learned about learning Unity with an audience of traditional GIS developers-- people interested in game engines, but unsure of how to start building apps. As part of the presentation, we created a data visualization of real-time mentions of conflict around the world, by:
- Requesting the latest records from the GDELT Project when the scene loads
- Rendering a particle system to represent each record, placed at its real-world location, using the global viewing mode in the ArcGIS Maps SDK for Unity
- Displaying attributes of the records on hover
- Modeling a globe arm + base in Blender, and modifying the built-in ArcGIS Camera Controller to spin the globe underneath the arm.
gallery // click for full images
