Moving entities in ArcMap

Question

For a project, I want to simulate movement of individual entities on a map. Someone recommended ArcGIS for this purpose, so I looked around a bit and found ArcMap. For anyone who is experienced with the program: is it possible to plot, say, a dot on a location of a map, and make it move using a for loop? I know this is a really general question, but I thought I'd try to find out more about the program before actually getting a license. Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

This was possibly in a very ancient predecessor to ArcMap, so I'm sure it's still possible. Back then it was programmable with Avenue. Now it's programmable with VBA.

In fact, I found this for you:

http://webhelp.esri.com/arcgisdesktop/9.2/pdf/Animation_in_ArcMap_Tutorial.pdf

If that's not exactly what you want, you can revert to VBA.

Answer 2

While it is certainly possible to animate with ArcMap, it is not all that straight forward and yields mediocre results.

You can also animate using Google Earth.

https://developers.google.com/kml/documentation/time?hl=en