I've had several discussions with DOT's from around the U.S. about the growing interest in the use of drones. Drones have a significant advantage over traditional aerial photography and LiDAR capture in that they are inexpensive, generally easy to fly and they can come equipped with a camera and LiDAR sensor. We are seeing drones used to capture change detection along construction projects, culvert inspections, and bridge inspections. Other emerging use cases include damage assement, land/rock slide geo-technical inspections, visibility analysis, and rail crossing inspections. Drone to Map for ArcGIS supports the uses of drones and allows users to analyze and store the data captured from a drone directly into ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise as web services. Drone to Map for ArcGIS can produce to types of web services. Integrated Mesh Scene Layer and Point Cloud Scene Layer. Point Cloud Scene Layers allow the viewer to look through objects like tunnels and culverts. If your LiDAR vendor is actively collecting data using mobile, terrestrial or aerial LiDAR, be sure to request that they deliver the data with RGB point symbiology attributes. Many LiDAR vendors are not doing this but are starting to, this allows the point cloud to be displayed using true color, making the point cloud look more realistic. Density of the points matters as does resolution of the sensor.
To help understand what is possible, I put together a video of data captured by Guenter Doeffel, Marketing at SynerGIS Infomationsysteme Wien in Germany, here is a link to the web scene he published. You need to allow the data to download and cache into the browser, once that happens it renders very quickly.
Here is a video I put together showing the Web Scene embedded in a story map
