Apple improving 3D Flyover visuals in iOS 6 Maps - Page 3

The case of SIRI "listening" with its ear plugged with a cotton ball.... Good thing it didn't spell out "oh sloow" before "Barthelona" which I thought was the long lost cousin of Bart Simpson...

I remember just about five or six years ago I was able to tilt the view on terrain and see the 3D rendering of some rugged area in Canada and the US with Google Earth, plus some areas in Europe and Asia. I was on a "Fiber Optic Network" at the time, it was fun to see many places you've been and the even much much more places you've never been. It was to me, just a toy, enough to spend roughly an hour or so of your time wasting the bandwidth.

You must've forgotten that these buyers of i-gadgets are generally very rich and love flaunting their wealth around. Many of them own a small i-Plane Mini which would get them to where they are going using Apple's "fly-over" view. Apple and its engineers are building many i-Landing strips everywhere, as we speak, in many metropolitan area around the world to cater this ever growing wealthy segment of i-Gadget users. 

It's as though the trolls don't WANT to be taken seriously.

Well the promise of flying cars has been around for at least fifty years, although it hasn't eventuated yet, it's good to know that iOS users will be prepared.

What is the betting Google is also working night and day on a vector based system to totally replace their pixel system before they are left in the dust. Meanwhile the swiftboating attacks will continue unabated.

I'll have one of what ever your drinking ... /lol

I wish that, instead of fixing this useless 3-D flyover stuff, they'd fix some of the basic business location info from Yelp! 1/4 of the time I do a search for a business in Apple Maps, I don't get a location (usually when I'm off on the name by a couple letters).

This weekend I was trying to use the new Starbucks app with Apple Passbook integration - both times, it failed (yes, I have all notifications & alerts an show-on-lockscreen turned on). I began to suspect that it might be due to my iPhone thinking that I'm not really at the Starbucks that I knew I was standing in. I brought up Apple Maps and, sure enough, it thought Starbucks was several hundred yards down the road! Of course I reported the problem - being the Apple beta tester/free labor that I am for Apple. But the same thing happened the next day, at a different Starbucks.

So not only are Apple Maps severely lacking in their own right, they appear to make Apple's Passbook feature useless too.

Gatorguy (of course) has already mentioned they DO have a beta of that.

 

Wonder why. 

I personally prefer the 'Before' images. Reminds me of the TV Show Fringe.

 

As much as you are annoyed by his point of view, it is a valid point and it should continually come up when discussing iOS6 maps.

 

Flyover is mostly a gimmick in the sense that it doesn't help accomplish tasks that the map app is used for 99.9% of the time. On the other hand, street view is useful when doing map type things. It can actually help you get to your destination in a wide variety of ways. To see how obvious that is, note how many people will bring up google earth and fly around their final destination in order to learn something. Yeah, pretty much nobody does that. On the other hand, people do actively seek out street view when doing map tasks.

 

With that said, it is neat to look, but just not for any type of actual mapping or navigational purpose. It's more like site-seeing rather than planning a trip or navigating.

Someone will come along any minute to claim that Street View is superior to 3D Flyover because no one uses 3D flyover.

Why is 2D aerial and satellite imagery of the entire globe (Space Oblique Mercator projection) and 3D aerial and satellite imagery superimposed on a digital elevation model providing a 360-degree panoramic overhead oblique view including a low level "bird's eye view" (Space Oblique Mercator-variant projection) especially as supplemented further by multiple (typically) static photographs of points of interest superior to Street View?

Every projection misrepresents the surface of the Earth in some way. Since all projections can show one or more but not all of the following; the greater the number of projections the greater the ability of the user to discern their location (although larger numbers of projections become increasingly confusing at an exponential rate); true direction, true distance, true areas, true shape.

Dead reckoning is an unreliable method given that the average global positioning system (GPS) user is not trained in the technique. For the purposes of modern living, satellite navigation is vastly superior and additionally methods to supplement the model only increase navigation accuracy. Furthermore, given the limitations of 360-degree panoramic "street level" views of the entire surface of the planet which is entirely impractical versus aerial and satellite photography the superiority of the later becomes manifest.

Furthermore, Google Street View relies on end-to-end attached pictures and nodes users must pass through, dramatically limiting the ability to visualize "the street" from different points of view whereas Apple 3D Flyover provides a continuous representation of a location, without waiting for a picture to be loaded when changing locations 20 meters. Additionally, while Apple 3D Flyover is simply another representation within the same app providing full continuity and integration with other representations while Google Street View must be invoked, interrogated and selected.

While when this story first appeared my iPad had the Brooklyn Bridge correction (and dropped a pin straight on Miss Liberty's head) my iPhone 5 still had the wrinkled bridge.

Over the weekend the wrinkles on the BB went away.

Varying servers with different image files?

Ah competition, this is exactly how its meant to work right. The market will sort itself out. Thnak you Apple for finally making maps space a truly competitive marker and now Google can't rest on it a$$

While data hosting on multiple servers is certainly a possibility given the following patent:

Load Balanced, Redundant Servers hosting the Geodata in Random Access Memory as "Shards" will provide efficient server interrogation (requests). According to United States Patent Application 20110276692 entitled "Server Load Balancing Using Geodata," Apple Maps will "Be divided among a plurality of servers based on geographical divisions in a process known as sharding. Sharding divides a collection of data into multiple segments called shards. Thus, each division of the world is a shard of geodata which includes data describing that segment of the world, data describing objects collectively making up that segment of the world, and/or data associated with a coordinate falling within that segment of the world."

"The shards of geodata can be distributed among a plurality of servers. Accordingly, each server is only responsible for a limited portion of the entire data set, which enables faster retrieval of geodata. Additionally, the same shard of data can be stored on more than one server so that multiple servers can share the load of serving many requests. This is especially useful in systems serving a high volume of requests."

"To accommodate the fact that some cells will contain less data than others, cells can be combined into shards made up of a plurality of cells. In such embodiments, a cell can be considered a basic unit of a shard, which can be combined into larger groups of data. FIG. 2 illustrates that a single cell overlapping several Northern California cities (San Jose, San Francisco, Sacramento) contains enough data that the cell itself can be its own shard. Accordingly, shard 214 is shown being stored on a server disk 212. In contrast, the gray cells overlapping Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Western Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and parts of Arizona illustrate a shard 204 made up of several cells. Shard 204 is stored on server disk 202."


The difference in data could also be attributed to aggressive caching on the device:

"Vector maps in iOS 6 are so efficient that Apple can cache a very large surrounding area for offline browsing and GPS navigation when traveling outside of WiFi or mobile data coverage."

 

In the long run, I agree. More major companies offering competing mapping products is a good thing.

 

Unfortunately, in the short run, iphone users are saddled with inferior maps.

 

Interesting. Hopefully that caching is smart enough that it uses check sums or version tracking for cached data. That seems like a no-brainer.

 

Beyond that, intelligent caching could recognize where you spend most of your time and cache map data for that area. For instance, I only leave the Pittsburgh region for occasional vacations and business trips. It would make sense to cache the entire city if possible. Most important would be the street locations and one-way street data.

Fly-over data? Not so much. In fact I wish there were a way to disable 3D mode and map rotation entirely.

 

Are we talking about that well-known blackmailer, or someone else?

On the iPhone, Apple’s new maps are far better than Google’s ever were for the following reasons:

 

1. Vector maps use less data so Apple maps actually load on the painfully slow AT&T Edge Network (read: antiquated and shitty) many of us are stuck with when navigating rural places. Google’s NEVER did.
2. Apple’s new Maps.app caches enough data to continue to work if (when) you lose network data. Google’s NEVER did.
3. Google maps have often led me miles (sometime 15 or more freaking miles) out of my way, especially in rural areas. Apple's have not failed me, yet…

 

Yes, Apple needs more points of interest to flesh out the map data—but Google maps could never reliably indicate a gas station or a diner off a highway exit or even in downtown freaking-ass Baltimore so what the hell was so great about Google maps? Street view? Oh yeah, that's the best thing ever when you're low on gas in the ’hood seven-hundred miles from home and Google shows one gas station 45 minutes away even though there are several within walking distance if it would only tell you where &^*^&%&$%#$@%$#!

 

So come on world, keep on bitching about weird looking shit in 3D flyover, that’s worth launching a fresh crusade against Apple, for sure.

Let’s milk this non-issue FOREVER.

 

…Oh, and the New York Times ‘writers’ (except for Pogue) can go piss up a rope—a greater teeming hive of yellow journalists the world has never known.

Edited by MacManFelix - 10/8/12 at 6:16pm

You don't mess with the Brooklyn Bridge yo.