Apple Maps team spotted doing on-foot sensor recon in San Francisco
In what appears to be a first for Apple, data collection for Apple Maps is now being done on foot and not just in vehicles, photos published on Friday reveal.
At least one person has been spotted roaming San Francisco with a large, Apple Maps-branded, sensor-laden backpack. The gear appears to be similar to that used on Apple's auto rigs, incorporating cameras, GPS, and LIDAR.
The photos were shared with MacRumors by reader Dante Cesa.
While it's uncertain why Apple is doing on-foot collection, the likely answer is an attempt to improve pedestrian directions in major cities. Apps like Apple Maps will often use a limited interpretation of where people can walk, resulting in unnecessary delays.
The company just recently deployed a new car to its recon fleet, the Subaru Impreza hatchback. Until recently the company had been depending solely on minivans.
In June, Apple finally revealed that its vehicles were being used to produce first-party mapping data. The company's Maps app started out with content from Google, but that was ditched in 2012 for a hodgepodge of sources including TomTom. Apple has frequently been criticized for missing or inaccurate information, even if complaints have diminished in the past six years.
As a part of its improvements, the company is hoping to be faster to cope with road and construction changes, while also displaying more detail.
At least one person has been spotted roaming San Francisco with a large, Apple Maps-branded, sensor-laden backpack. The gear appears to be similar to that used on Apple's auto rigs, incorporating cameras, GPS, and LIDAR.
The photos were shared with MacRumors by reader Dante Cesa.
While it's uncertain why Apple is doing on-foot collection, the likely answer is an attempt to improve pedestrian directions in major cities. Apps like Apple Maps will often use a limited interpretation of where people can walk, resulting in unnecessary delays.
The company just recently deployed a new car to its recon fleet, the Subaru Impreza hatchback. Until recently the company had been depending solely on minivans.
In June, Apple finally revealed that its vehicles were being used to produce first-party mapping data. The company's Maps app started out with content from Google, but that was ditched in 2012 for a hodgepodge of sources including TomTom. Apple has frequently been criticized for missing or inaccurate information, even if complaints have diminished in the past six years.
As a part of its improvements, the company is hoping to be faster to cope with road and construction changes, while also displaying more detail.
Comments
Who you gonna call? Apple Maps Dude!
If there's something weird and it don't look good,
Who you gonna call? Apple Maps Dude!
These guys will stick to city streets to avoid crossing the stream.
They're really serious about this.
Oh, and before GoogleGuy points out that the mothership has had mapping foot patrols for years, here are the two sh*ts I don't give.
💩💩
I’m not saying you made such a mistake necessarily, I’m saying that the only times I can duplicate that error is when I feed Siri incomplete information like that (or, as another example that happens to me fairly often, saying I want the [business] in [neighbourhood/village/region] name rather than its actual street name. Siri doesn’t yet seem to know colloquial/community/neighbourhood names too well, at least where I live).
Your overall point that there’s room for improvement is accepted, even by lkrupp I suspect, but your comment wasn’t really relevant as part of an article about how Apple is continuing its efforts to improve Siri. If you’d said something along the lines of “I’m glad to see this, maybe it will help with Siri’s ability to understand my queries for specific branches of [business],” I doubt lkrupp would have been moved to comment.
My desire would be to return the exact match only, and I was being very accurate and specific. I don’t want all Kaiser locations just the one I asked for. They could always put a button to show more locations, but as with most Siri results don’t support conversational conditions. Once she gives you results she has completely forgotten the original query.
In Google it didn’t even show the map at first. It just displayed the exact address as the first result much like it does if you ask a math formula query