Apple Maps Flyover Reverse Engineering(github.com) |
Apple Maps Flyover Reverse Engineering(github.com) |
And I'd kinda be curious to what Microsoft has been working on, I remember their birds eye was pretty good a few years ago.
Apple I'd believe the are selectively trying to improve their data in areas that are heavily visited by their users.
Also, I did for the first time see an Apple branded car with a photo sphere on the roof recently and kinda got excited that they are gonna try and bring competition into maps / street view that Google has dominated for the last decade.
https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/29/apple-acquired-mind-blowing-3...
The technique is detailed in the conference paper:
https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of...
Essentially they use a rig of DSLR cameras mounted to the bottom of a Cessna to take photographs in a 45 meter grid, and then do stereo reconstruction from that. Crucially they describe using fast phase based disparity maps, which at the time were a recently declassified technique for guiding cruise missiles. C3 was a part of the defense contractor Saab AB.
*Disclaimer - I worked for Nokia at the time.
Previous discussion on how Google Maps' Satellite View was almost named Bird Mode: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19235017
tl;dr they're using it to make better maps
LIDAR could definitely assist with identifying what the user is looking at.
It's a metaphor. Like 'bird's eye view'.
Power consumption and weight of the rig isn't insubstantial, so the smallest planes and gliders can't be used, and after that cost per hour and cost per mile are the key metrics.
Planes can be 10x cheaper by that metric.
Are you in Cali?
So it looks like the intentional errors method didn't work out in the end. [1]
Wonder if Apple will be as accommodating though :p
https://www.gislounge.com/map-traps-intentional-mapping-erro...
I took a picture.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/may/15/google-ad...