Chapter 7 was neat in the sense that it taught us how to make our flat GIS map into a 3D one, and that was exciting! One of the main concepts was 3D Web Scenes, which is how the 3D maps are created. You can use WebGIS and ArcGIS Pro to create the maps, which can also be interactive. The chapter also explained how we can create, share, and interact with the geographic data through the different web platforms. From what I understood, the web scene is the 3D equivalent of a web map, which made it a lot easier to understand! You can use it to create different landscapes, such as elevation and topography, buildings, and even clouds! I did have to look through each tutorial carefully in order to get all this information, but it wasn’t bad once I did that. It seems like the web scenes are also really helpful for big data sets, which would be nice for large organizations to display their data; as discussed in previous chapters.
Chapter 7 continued with talking about the application and the creation of certain 3D maps. You can create a 3D map using ArcGIS Online, and you can do that by changing the feature values of the height of different objects. One of the tutorials highlighted this, and that was helpful to see. I thought it was cool that you could also adjust the shadows of different objects! That is something I’d want to use in my project. Another thing that they discussed was analysis in 3D, such as shadow features and how the features interact in space. I think this would all be helpful in environmental planning and architecture, especially in urban environments. There are some really neat tools described in the tutorials as well, and I definitely did not know how to use them until I went through the tutorials, so that was something cool I learned. I think an application I would use from this chapter would be using the 3D Web Scenes feature to compare the height of trees and houses in close proximity within Delaware, Ohio. I think this could be useful because then we could see the amount of space that is being used for development and how those houses could impact sunlight exposure in different neighborhoods.