this is the same person who RE'd Google Earth a couple months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18900080
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Apple Maps Flyover Reverse Engineering
21–30 of 30 posts
Re: Apple Maps Flyover Reverse Engineering
#22I don't think this is satellite data, most likely photos captured from planes. 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…
The Apple street view cars also have LIDAR, so I'm curious to see what their plan is for that.
Considering the expense, and especially time, involved in gathering street-level data, if I was Apple, I'd put every sensor I could think of on those cars and then let the data scientists figure out a use for it later.
Re: Apple Maps Flyover Reverse Engineering
#23I don't think this is satellite data, most likely photos captured from planes. 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…
It's planes and I think also helicopters. I've written satellite mode in the repo because the Maps app button says "Satellite"
Re: Apple Maps Flyover Reverse Engineering
#24I’d be interested in hearing how they reverse engineered the data!
Mostly used popular tools like Hopper, LLDB, Hex Fiend. Xcode's debugger UI was surprisingly helpful too because it lists current memory allocations of obj-c instances nicely. Also learned about Frida along the way and would have used it more in retrospect.
Re: Apple Maps Flyover Reverse Engineering
#25Coincidence: Half an hour after reading this thread, a white Subaru with California tags stopped at the red light outside my office window. Big disco ball on a platform attached to the roof and "Apple Maps maps.apple.com" stenciled on the window.
I took a picture.
Re: Apple Maps Flyover Reverse Engineering
#26I don't think this is satellite data, most likely photos captured from planes. 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…
The 3d content in Apple Maps comes from their acquisition of C3: 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…
Nokia also invested in C3 and had the first 3D maps available to consumers before anyone, completely in WebGL which used to be on https://wego.here.com. I guess Apple had more money to acquire them.
*Disclaimer - I worked for Nokia at the time.
Re: Apple Maps Flyover Reverse Engineering
#27I don't think this is satellite data, most likely photos captured from planes. 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…
It's planes and I think also helicopters. I've written satellite mode in the repo because the Maps app button says "Satellite"
It'll be planes, because the running cost per mile travelled is critical to making the whole thing cost effective.
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.
Re: Apple Maps Flyover Reverse Engineering
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's planes and I think also helicopters. I've written satellite mode in the repo because the Maps app button says "Satellite"
It'll be planes, because the running cost per mile travelled is critical to making the whole thing cost effective. 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.
makes sense. the region for Phoenix is named "phoenix_heli" though so i figure that one was captured from a helicopter
Re: Apple Maps Flyover Reverse Engineering
#29that's really great
Re: Apple Maps Flyover Reverse Engineering
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Apple street view cars also have LIDAR, so I'm curious to see what their plan is for that.
Considering the expense, and especially time , involved in gathering street-level data, if I was Apple, I'd put every sensor I could think of on those cars and then let the data scientists figure out a use for it later.
Didn’t Google get burned by doing that and “accidentally” collecting Wi-Fi network data?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/may/15/google-ad...