Apple's new "look around" street view competitor looks really impressive. Rather than being a series of photo spheres and smearing between them as you move, th

Apple's new "look around" street view competitor looks really impressive. Rather than being a series of photo spheres and smearing between them as you move, the buildings and other objects are built out from 3D scans so that it can have accurate perspective as you move down the street. There's still fudging for small objects like overhead powerlines, lampposts, trees, and street signs which don't get picked up in detail by LIDAR, but it looks very good: https://imgur.com/a/rgHjWmS https://imgur.com/a/rgHjWmS In particular, watch how the cars, plants, and buildings slide by as you move from one spot to another. Having all this information will also help Apple with their address locations, knowing exactly where entrances are to buildings, etc. They'll need to work on keeping that updated in the case that the scan data goes stale, but having this in-house instead of needing to work through third party providers should allow them to close the gaps behind Google Maps significantly. In other ways (like the quality of the street imagery), they're jumping ahead. Don't have the new maps available near me yet but I'm looking forward to it.