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Esri has just released Drone2Map for ArcGIS, a beta application that was opened for public download Feb. 24. Drone2Map incorporates Pix4D’s powerful image-processing engine to analyze images taken from drones and convert them into a variety of 2-D and 3-D maps. “Drones are an emerging technology with the potential to revolutionize how we work across many industries,” said Esri president Jack Dangermond, who announced the beta release of Drone2Map for ArcGIS at the Esri Federal GIS Conference in Washington, DC. “We built Drone2Map for ArcGIS to give people the ability to process, use, and share imagery—all within ArcGIS.” Drone2Map is integrated into ArcGIS, it is designed primarily for work in the field. Once a drone lands and the camera’s images are transferred to a laptop equipped with Drone2Map, the program will run a preprocess analysis on lower-resolution samples from the image set to determine whether the captured images have the data required to determine location and to make measurements of features. Imagery products that can be created with Drone2Map for ArcGIS include orthomosaics, digital surface models, and 3D point clouds and meshes. The app detects camera and sensor parameters and then intelligently applies appropriate defaults. And while the resulting maps can be loaded into ArcGIS desktop software for further analysis and processing, one cool feature of Drone2Map is that the user can move maps directly to the ArcGIS Online web maps or 3-D PDF files while still in the field. Still Beta program, : http://www.esri.com/products/drone2map