Apple has other things to fix, like their POI search is inferior to Google, especially internationally. It's a style-over-substance gimmick, not a competitive differentiator. On the other hand, Apple attracted some of the criticism on itself by focusing so much on the 3D aspect. The world is very large, so it cannot be expected that all of these would be fixed in short order. It's a standard artifact of Photogrammetry and algorithmic techniques to detect things like bridges, trees, and other structures only goes so far and needs to be aided by human labor. I think the criticism against Apple for warped 3D is unfair. This would make Street View work almost like a 3D game, provide data for augmented reality, and is not something that Apple can easily duplicate (unlike 3D mapping cities, which you can do by renting overflights with special cameras that do thousands of square miles at a time) without setting up its own fleet of cars to drive through the world's cities. What Apple ought to worry about is Google doing Photogrammetry on Street View level data to extract true 3D Street Views. Remember when "Design is not about how it looks, but how it works?" Well, 3D maps, no matter how fancy they look, are less useful than 2D or first-person perspective. It chews up much more CPU/GPU/memory, storage, and network bandwidth and offers very little over 2D or 2D projective maps. I would expect a future version of Google Maps for Mobile to include integrated 3D, but it is probably not a priority them right now, because honestly, 3D is mostly bells and whistles. The real future of Google Maps is shown in the current Web version which offers integrated 2D, Satellite, 3D, Street View, Photo Tours, Photo Spheres, Transit, and Indoor Maps. For example, often when I am taking a road trip, I will "drive" the route near the final destination inside of street view in order to visually memorize the landmarks I need to recognize.Īlso, Google Earth is a separate product, and much more enterprise driven, it has substantially larger datasets than the consumer maps with lots more data overlay layers (KML support), even support for the Moon, Mars, and Sky Maps. The 3D view is nice for showing off, but it really doesn't have the utility of street level photos. This 1:1 comparison is pretty rock-solid evidence for how intellectually dishonest critisism against Apple tends to be, as well as the different standard they're held at, even by people who claim to despise the company. Meanwhile, Apple's version looks perfect, with an insane level of detail. Even now, almost a year after Apple maps was released and this imagery was mocked, Google STILL hasn't fixed theirs, and again- noone gives a shit or cares, especially Google cheerleaders. Noone ever noticed, and the ones who did didn't give a shit. Meanwhile, Google has had the SAME image with pretty much the EXACT SAME distortions- on a product they've been working on for 7 years. Major news sites such as CNN also used it, feigning shock and contempt. Every single fandroid and apple hater reposted it with glee, over and over again, and used it to troll about how bad the product was. The image was supposed to show just show shitty Apple maps was. The distorted image was used to headline pretty much every single negative Maps article, I must have seen it posted thousands of times, accompanied with mockery and denigration. The 3D Hoover dam image is the perfect litmus test to portray the insane discrepency between the coverage of Apple and Google products.
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