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From Points on a Map to a Living Biological Network
The world we know is built on an intricate web of connections. Every ecosystem, community, and habitat depends on a constantly shifting network of relationships that can be difficult to see, even with the best available data. Maps have always been an essential tool for understanding that world. Biodiversity maps can show…
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Inside Out: Optimizing Evacuation Plans
Safety First Seconds matter. When you enter a building, will you know the quickest way to evacuate and get to safety? Will you know where the nearest safe zone is once you leave the building? With safety in mind, I began to look at ArcGIS Indoors with even greater potential. How could facilities managers or safety planners…
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AI-Powered Image and Text Analysis in ArcGIS Pro
Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming part of our everyday GIS workflows. It allows us to work faster, uncover insights more easily, and automate tasks that used to require hours of manual effort. One of the newest additions to the ArcGIS Python API makes this easier than ever. The new arcgis.ai module provides…
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To Infill‑ity and Beyond: 3D Printing from ArcGIS Pro
What if your GIS data didn't stop at the screen? Now in ArcGIS Pro, you can export a Local Scene straight to .STL or .glTF file formats and send it to a 3D printer — turning DEMs, bathymetry, and cityscapes into objects you can hold, rotate, and pass around a conference table. Suddenly a ridgeline isn't a color ramp; it's…
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Your Popup Can Do More Than You Think
Most popups are just a list of field names and values. Everything is technically there, but almost none of it is easy to read at a glance, and none of it tells you what is actually happening in a neighborhood. For my Boston GeoEquity project, I wanted my census block groups to do more than list their attributes. I wanted…
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GeoXC Team at the 2026 Esri User Conference
Every July, San Diego fills up with tens of thousands of people who care, deeply, about maps and GIS. The Esri User Conference is the industry's biggest reunion and its biggest showroom at once — a week of packed sessions, hallway catch-ups, and demo floors buzzing with what's newly possible in GIS. If you've ever been to…
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Create an interactive watercolor globe
In this blog post I want to show you how you can steal some of John Nelson's watercolor styles and use them on an interactive web globe. I used this style to depict happy moments collected for a research about happiness. You can check out the application here: What makes us happy? For the countries I used Dylan Moriarty's…
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How to create a 3D winter basemap with ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript
I was recently investigating how to show a winter landscape in a 3D interactive web scene. I had a lot of inspiration from John Nelson's blog post and video on this topic, James Niehue's beautiful paintings of winter landscapes and, of course, nature itself: My goal with this project was to create a basemap that sends…
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Using Lidar of the Jack and Laura Dangermond Preserve
Lidar provides a fascinating glimpse into the landscape of the Jack and Laura Dangermond Preserve. Using a ground elevation service and a point cloud created from lidar, and natural color imagery, we created an interactive routing application that allows users to virtually drive through the Preserve. This article will tell…
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Focal Diversity for Pro
Diversity Tools is a bit of an experimental python toolbox that currently contains only a single tool, Focal Diversity. The tool can calculate two diversity indexes for rectangular focal areas based on a single band raster input. The Shannon Diversity Index, often referred to as Shannon-Weaver or Shannon-Wiener Index and…
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Distributive Flow Maps for Pro
A new version of the Distributive Flow Lines (DFL) tool is now available. (Dec 15 , 2022) updating compatibility to ArcGIS Pro 3.0. A couple of enhancements were made and some code cleanup. The tool now uses the new Distance Accumulation tool. If you want to use the tool in ArcMap, the previous version of the DFL and the…
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Building the Cumulative Exposure to Climate Change App
In June of 2017 we began another collaboration with Dr. Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii, Department of Geography. This came on the heels of our previous project with Dr. Mora to develop a web mapping application to display his team's research on climate change and deadly heatwaves. For their next project they had…
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Spider Diagram Geoprocessing Tool
The map above shows some spider diagrams. These diagrams are useful for presenting spatial distribution, for example, customers for a retail outlet or the hometowns of university students. The lab was recently tasked with creating an automated spider diagram tool without using Business Analyst or Network Analyst. The…
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Deep Learning with the AWS DeepLens
Motivation Amazon recently released a deep learning enabled camera called the DeepLens (https://aws.amazon.com/deeplens/). The DeepLens allows developers to build, train, and deploy deep learning models to carry out custom computer vision tasks. The Applications Prototype Lab obtained a DeepLens and began to explore its…
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Visualizing the Human Hand Using CityEngine
Every now and then a really unique and out-of-the-box idea comes our way that expands our conceptions about the possible applications of the ArcGIS platform. This was one of those ideas. Could GIS be used to map the human body? More specifically, could we use CityEngine to visualize the progress of physical therapy for our…
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Centrality Analysis Toolbox
The graph theory concept of Centrality has gained popularity in recent years as a way to gain insight into network behavior. In graph or network theory, Centrality measures are used to determine the relative importance of a vertex or edge within the overall network. There are many types of centrality. Betweenness…
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Routing around future accidents
At the 2018 Esri DevSummit in Palm Springs, Omar Maher demonstrated how to predict accident probability using artificial intelligence (AI). The Applications Prototype Lab (APL) has built an iOS application allowing drivers to route around accident prone areas, suggesting the safest route available. The safest route has the…
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Dual Platform Mobile Cell Signal Strength Logging
Intro The Applications Prototype Lab was asked to create an app that would collect and record cellular signal strength at various locations around the new Jack and Laura Dangermond Preserve. Two of us did just that: my colleague Al Pascual wrote the iOS version, and I wrote the Android version. Though we used very…
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Esri-3D-Android App
I built this app to show some of the capabilities of the recently released ArcGIS Quartz Runtime 100.2.1 SDK for Android—specifically its 3D capabilities. The 3D and runtime teams have put in a lot of work to make 3D data and analyses run smoothly on the latest mobile devices. What does it do? Esri’s I3S specification…
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3d Navigation with Xbox Controller
This is an experimental project to test the effectiveness of using a Microsoft Xbox controller to navigate in 3d web applications built using Esri's ArcGIS API for JavaScript. This work was inspired by a customer that illustrated the difficulty of navigating underwater in a custom web application. Click here for the live…
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Indoor Location Prototype
Introduction The most common technique for indoor location, determining an observer location inside an enclosed space, is the blue dot tracking approach. A client-side algorithm is actively tracking signals in its environment to determine the observer’s location in the context of the received signals. The types of received…
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Siting new health clinics with the ArcGIS API for Python
Among the best resources for learning the ArcGIS API for Python are the sample notebooks at the developers website. A new sample notebook is now available that demonstrates how to perform a network analysis to find the best locations for new health clinics for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patients in California. To…
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Where did the Water Flow on Mars?
This blog posting was first published in August 2013 on the previous blog infrastructure. In the 2008 article ‘Where Did Water Flow on Mars? Modeling Mars’ surface in search of ancient rivers and oceans’ Witold Fraczek demonstrated how GIS can furnish support for the theory that at some time in the past, water did flow on…
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Motion Mapper
First published on 14 January, 2013. Motion Mapper is an application built using Esri’s ArcGIS Runtime for WPF and Microsoft’s Kinect for Window'SDK. The application uses Kinect’s audio and motion recognition to interact with the map and exploit Landsat satellite imagery without the use of a keyboard or mouse. The source…
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Landsat Viewer
The lab has just completed an experimental viewer designed to sort, filter and extract individual Landsat scenes. The viewer is a web application developed using Esri's JavaScript API and a three.js-based external renderer. Click here for the live application. Click here for the source code. The application has a…
