Overview
Esri’s new Reality Engine is now released as the main processing engine in Site Scan for ArcGIS.
The first release phase and what it means for your projects
All projects have a new setting called Processing Engine with the following options that can be configured any time:
- Reality Engine
- Legacy Engine
With the first release out of beta, the Reality Engine has been set as the default processing engine for the following projects:
- Project is in a UTM coordinate system and has no GCPs
- Project is in a UTM coordinate system and has GCPs in a UTM or WGS84 based coordinate system
Other projects still use the Legacy Engine as the default. Over the coming releases, additional projects’ processing engine setting will be transitioned to the Reality Engine.
During this transition phase, if you encounter unexpected results with the Reality Engine, you can revert to the Legacy Engine as needed. If you do revert, we ask that you let us know why the Reality Engine didn’t meet your expectations. Please fill out the survey or contact Technical Support.
Why did this change happen?
Processing drone imagery is part of Site Scan’s foundation and it’s important that processing is accurate, efficient, and generates high quality results. We are striving to deliver the best processing engine on the market and share it across all ArcGIS Reality products.
Since the Reality Engine is built and maintained by Esri, we have a level of control over feature and quality enhancements that we did not have when using third party technology. This allows us to directly develop improvements that are requested by our users, rather than being subject to the different priorities of third parties. We look forward to incorporating your feedback to help make Site Scan and the Reality Engine better.
Reality Engine improvements
During the beta period, we received important user feedback about how the Reality Engine handled the processing of different datasets. The development teams that support Site Scan and the Reality Engine made several changes based on the feedback during this time:
- Implemented significant stability improvements in Reality Engine processing
- Added NAVD 88 vertical datum support
- Implemented performance improvements for OBJ mesh processing
In addition, there are several upcoming improvements to the Reality Engine:
- Enhance processing report
- Support processing of larger datasets
- Improve reconstruction of thin structures in mesh
- Support boundary cropping
- Support thermal and multispectral (currently these are always processed in the Legacy engine)
- Support for additional coordinate systems
- Support 3D Tiles format for mesh
We look forward to hearing about your experiences with the Reality Engine as we consider further improvements.
