The recipients of the NSW-ACT region 2022 Asia-Pacific Spatial Excellence Awards have been announced by the Surveying & Spatial Sciences Institute (SSSI) and Spatial Industries Business Association (SIBA|GITA).
NSW Region winners
The SSSI Individual Award winners are:
- Diversity & Inclusion Award: Brian Nicholls
- Educational Development Award: Dawn Hendrick
The Industry Award winners are:
- Community Impact: Spatial Vision and Climate Council (Climate Risk Webmap)
- Workforce Development & Inclusion: FrontierSI, UNSW, OMNILINK, Commonwealth Bank, NSW Government, Liverpool City Council (NSW) and State Analytics (Value Australia)
- Innovation, Medium-to-large Business: Veris and Wumara Group (Indigenous Surveyor Employment Pathway Program)
ACT Region winners
The SSSI Individual Award winner for Future Leadership is Kathryn Hooton.
The SIBA|GITA Industry Award winners are as follows:
- Technical Excellence: Geoscape Australia (Geoscape Buildings 3.0)
- Community Impact: Geoscience Australia (Digital Earth Africa Establishment Team)
- Innovation, Medium-to-large business: Australian Bureau of Statistics (Putting Census on the Map)
- Spatial Enablement: WildBear Entertainment and Esri Australia (Mastering the art of storytelling with maps.
WildBear, whose programs have been distributed in more than 50 countries by broadcasters such as the BBC, Netflix, National Geographic and Discovery, received its award for its application of GIS technology to produce animated, broadcast-ready maps for their documentaries.
Prior to implementing a spatial technology-led solution, WildBear’s graphics team would spend several days manually tracing borders and using satellite imagery to incorporate changes in borders, sea levels or landscapes over time, all to create a single 2D or 3D map.
On top of that manual process, imagery was mostly sourced from the NASA Blue Marble and Natural Earth collections and designers had very limited access to geospatial information or imagery outside of these resources.
Access to Esri’s GIS software — under a first-of-its-kind partnership agreement with the Australian distributor — has now opened new capabilities.
“We do lots of history and science documentaries at WildBear and a typical episode may contain up to 12 animated maps which need to feature geographically and historically accurate borders, locations, points of interest and movements,” said WildBear Entertainment CEO, Michael Tear.
“Now, we’re able to create between three to four maps a day. We’ve created a series of worldwide maps in ArcGIS Pro with georeferenced layers including near real-time satellite imagery, vector data and 3D topography.”
“The layers are exported in 32K resolution, edited in Adobe Illustrator, and built into an easy-to-use mapping template in Adobe After Effects, enabling anyone from the team to create accurate, stylised maps of all corners of the globe.”
