There's a parallax effect in Street View on Apple Maps that separates out the layers of every image. Things like lampposts or telephone poles all rotate slightly differently to whatever is behind them.
And it's such a subtle effect that I still break my brain trying to determine whether or not I've made it up.
Imagine expending that much development time and effort for something you're not even sure is there. And somehow I still find it enviably cool.
MBCook 29 minutes ago [-]
Oh wow I hadn’t noticed that. It’s especially noticeable when “walking” down the street between points.
I’m so glad to finally have that feature in my area. It was the one thing I missed from Google Maps which I otherwise avoid.
elAhmo 24 minutes ago [-]
I love this and share the experience! It is a very cool effect, specially when moving through the street.
StilesCrisis 27 minutes ago [-]
Drag two fingers on the map and you'll bring the camera down to see the 3D effect more clearly.
98codes 15 minutes ago [-]
For my life, I don't understand the gestures for the 3D map. It would seem that I can ONLY manipulate that view by accident.
efilife 33 minutes ago [-]
Sounds awesome, is there a video of it I could watch somewhere?
Edit: for those who didn't know, like me, apple's maps are available at https://maps.apple.com. You can see this yourself. The effect is unvelievably smooth compared to what Google maps have
modeless 16 minutes ago [-]
Oh cool, I didn't know they added their Street View equivalent to the web version. The animated transitions are much better than Google's.
pan69 5 minutes ago [-]
It does look smooth but for me the killer feature on google maps is still the ability to go back in time.
efilife 3 minutes ago [-]
They seem to be significantly slower though
MBCook 29 minutes ago [-]
Oh that’s right, I always forget they have it on the web.
modeless 23 minutes ago [-]
Street View is such a missed opportunity. In 2007 it was visionary and essential to create the map data that allowed Google Maps to win. In 2026 it is a symbol of Google's stagnation. Essentially zero improvement in user experience for more than a decade, in a time of incredible advancements in computer vision.
By now we should all be flying around the planet in a seamless 3D reconstruction unifying street level and satellite views and allowing smooth free camera motion all the way from space to the front door of buildings and even inside. Many years ago I saw internal Google demos of dramatically improved Street View rendering, none of which ever made it to production. Google has consistently failed to recognize the value of the product and systematically underinvested in the user experience.
kccqzy 11 minutes ago [-]
What you describe seems to have been implemented in Google Earth. It seems like an intentional product choice to do it in Google Earth and not Google Maps. Most people use Google Maps to get directions and reviews of places, and very few people I know even use the street view feature.
modeless 3 minutes ago [-]
Google Earth and Google Maps on desktop web have essentially the same rendering, which hasn't materially changed in 10 years or more and does not have the features I described.
People rarely use the Street View feature because it's difficult to access, and difficult to understand spatially. Free camera motion is impossible and the transitions are jerky and stilted. As a result it's relegated to special places in the UI that are rarely visited. If it was seamlessly integrated into satellite view then it would see much more usage.
taeric 14 minutes ago [-]
While I agree something like this sounds really neat, I am curious what the value proposition is? Pointedly, is it any higher than doing the same thing in a video game in a fantasy world?
modeless 6 minutes ago [-]
The difference is that it's useful for navigating the real world. You could have way better directions displays that show directions in context instead of just schematically. It would make the petabytes of imagery that has already been collected much more accessible and therefore useful, instead of being relegated to a special clunky Street View mode that is rarely visited. It would enable exploring real spaces in a way that provides much better spatial context, to build a spatial memory that helps your navigation when you get to the real place, before you get there. And yes, it would be fun. At one time, Google was into that sort of thing.
bgro 9 minutes ago [-]
I’ve been pointing to Google Maps, drive as specific but not the complete set of fantastic innovation we saw around ~2007 for how great developers used to be.
I think the drift is specifically tied to the introduction of leetcode in the interview process. Which may sound like a wild connection at first but I’ve now lived through being blocked and seeing how creative devs can’t get through leetcode gatekeepers who are microfussing and blanket critiquing devs as bad when they don’t have leetcode answers pre memorized in a mental hasmap to be able to regurgitate from memory which allows the extra mental capacity to free up in order to hold a performative class lecture about it at the same time.
You can spend your time memorizing the test taking skills to be good at tests. Maybe memorize the answers too. Or you can be coming up with grand ideas like maps and street view and thinking about how all these things in the world come together to be able to do that.
Not many are good at both and the entire stack of people doing interviews is currently blocked at fixing this. Nobody wants to have wasted their time memorizing leetcode to just not gatekeep people who didn’t put in “the same effort,” and no hiring team wants to gamble on somebody who fails the leetcode test processes and turns out to be the occasional bad hire with the only paperwork saying they didn’t pass the industry standard test and shouldn’t have gotten hired in the first place.
So we’re now blocked with only slop workers getting hired who don’t feel the same comfort to take big risks and we get slop like Microsoft notepad plus copilot 365 as a result.
coldpie 17 minutes ago [-]
That's monopoly behavior, baby! Break 'em up.
philipallstar 9 minutes ago [-]
No it's not.
hmokiguess 9 minutes ago [-]
Tangential comment but I still don't understand how we have technology to identify a car license plate from space but we have pixelated images from Antarctica on Google Maps / Google Earth. Why not publish that and make it accessible? Is it true that Antarctica is not easy to scan due to ice and snow?
chias 4 minutes ago [-]
Not sure this is the reason but: it is generally not easy to get a satellite over the poles. You launch close to the equator in the direction of Earth's spin to take advantage of the (very substantial!) speed you already have due to the rotation of the planet. Getting from an equatorial orbit to a polar one requires a huge amount of fuel / energy. You can't just sort of "drive it over".
Source: played a bunch of Kerbal space program
saynay 2 minutes ago [-]
I wonder if we just don't have many of these types of satellites in a polar orbit, since we don't have as big a need for that type of imagery for the poles?
bar94 5 minutes ago [-]
Pretty sure the license plate/street view level data is from the cars that drive around with a lidar thing strapped to the top, not satellite data
ks2048 10 minutes ago [-]
El Salvador looks black but has pretty good coverage throughout the country.
Costa Rica seems also to have more coverage than I see here.
Paraguay too.
bagels 16 minutes ago [-]
Why is there so much dense coverage in southern Ontario than anywhere else in North America?
Southern Ontario has 4x the road density of the province average, so might be a contributing factor?
OnACoffeeBreak 11 minutes ago [-]
"The darker colours are points that were updated closer to 2007 and the brighter colours closer to December of last year." It's possible that this area was just more recently updated and is not necessarily more densely covered compared to other areas.
jeffbee 24 minutes ago [-]
Is that base map style inspired by the board game Pandemic, the computer game DEFCON, or a third thing?
Edit: Apparently it is "Nova Map" base tile set from ArcGIS.
mcntsh 15 minutes ago [-]
Streetview is such an incredible product - one of the few digital products that still manages to bring me joy every day. it'll be a shame when it's inevitably enshitified.
encom 4 minutes ago [-]
I can see the value of it, certainly, but it's also probably Google's creepiest product. The street where I live, you can see inside peoples kitchens and living rooms on Street View. I had to ask Google twice to block my house, because they fucked it up the first time.
rootusrootus 5 minutes ago [-]
> it'll be a shame when it's inevitably enshitified
Depending on where you live, that happened about 10 years ago.
39 minutes ago [-]
Rendered at 18:47:32 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
There's a parallax effect in Street View on Apple Maps that separates out the layers of every image. Things like lampposts or telephone poles all rotate slightly differently to whatever is behind them.
And it's such a subtle effect that I still break my brain trying to determine whether or not I've made it up.
Imagine expending that much development time and effort for something you're not even sure is there. And somehow I still find it enviably cool.
I’m so glad to finally have that feature in my area. It was the one thing I missed from Google Maps which I otherwise avoid.
Edit: for those who didn't know, like me, apple's maps are available at https://maps.apple.com. You can see this yourself. The effect is unvelievably smooth compared to what Google maps have
By now we should all be flying around the planet in a seamless 3D reconstruction unifying street level and satellite views and allowing smooth free camera motion all the way from space to the front door of buildings and even inside. Many years ago I saw internal Google demos of dramatically improved Street View rendering, none of which ever made it to production. Google has consistently failed to recognize the value of the product and systematically underinvested in the user experience.
People rarely use the Street View feature because it's difficult to access, and difficult to understand spatially. Free camera motion is impossible and the transitions are jerky and stilted. As a result it's relegated to special places in the UI that are rarely visited. If it was seamlessly integrated into satellite view then it would see much more usage.
I think the drift is specifically tied to the introduction of leetcode in the interview process. Which may sound like a wild connection at first but I’ve now lived through being blocked and seeing how creative devs can’t get through leetcode gatekeepers who are microfussing and blanket critiquing devs as bad when they don’t have leetcode answers pre memorized in a mental hasmap to be able to regurgitate from memory which allows the extra mental capacity to free up in order to hold a performative class lecture about it at the same time.
You can spend your time memorizing the test taking skills to be good at tests. Maybe memorize the answers too. Or you can be coming up with grand ideas like maps and street view and thinking about how all these things in the world come together to be able to do that.
Not many are good at both and the entire stack of people doing interviews is currently blocked at fixing this. Nobody wants to have wasted their time memorizing leetcode to just not gatekeep people who didn’t put in “the same effort,” and no hiring team wants to gamble on somebody who fails the leetcode test processes and turns out to be the occasional bad hire with the only paperwork saying they didn’t pass the industry standard test and shouldn’t have gotten hired in the first place.
So we’re now blocked with only slop workers getting hired who don’t feel the same comfort to take big risks and we get slop like Microsoft notepad plus copilot 365 as a result.
Source: played a bunch of Kerbal space program
Costa Rica seems also to have more coverage than I see here.
Paraguay too.
edit: This page has some data: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Landscape-metrics-for-ro...
Southern Ontario has 4x the road density of the province average, so might be a contributing factor?
Edit: Apparently it is "Nova Map" base tile set from ArcGIS.
Depending on where you live, that happened about 10 years ago.