“Nearly a year after Apple introduced its own Maps service in iOS 6 with Flyover 3D satellite views, Google is expanding its own online Maps to support similar 3D satellite imagery, with the same sorts of buckled roads and visual distortions Apple was castigated for last summer,” Daniel Eran Dilger reports for AppleInsider.
“Unlike Apple’s iOS 6 Maps, which target relatively low powered mobile devices, the new 3D features in Google Maps that were introduced last week require a modern PC running a web browser with a supported version of WebGL hardware accelerated rendering,” Dilger reports. “That limits Google Maps’ photorealistic 3D features to users of Chrome or Firefox on a Mac or Windows PC.”
Dilger reports, “Mobile users will have to settle for grey 3D building models or use the increasingly outdated Google Earth, which unlike Apple Maps’ Flyover feature, is not integrated with the search and directions of Google’s mobile Maps apps… A year after Apple launched iOS 6 with Flyover, neither Google nor Nokia have a similar, integrated 3D visualization feature for their own mobile platforms.”
“Despite its years of experience in 2D digital mapping, Google’s year late, non-mobile 3D Maps product is riddled with the same kind of glitches that Apple scrambled to address after the release of its own new Maps was greeted with contempt and derision. And users don’t have to scour the planet to find undulating roads and smeared buildings in remote areas,” Dilger reports. “AppleInsider reader Vesko Kateliev shared Google Map’s image of Midtown Manhattan, where roads turn into waterfalls and parked cars slide up the side of of a building as if trying to escape from a rolling wave of energy twisting buildings and bulging roads into the air.”
Read more, and see the melting buildings and buckled streets, in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Surely, we’ll see the same sort of prolonged media frenzy over this as we did when Apple’s Flyover first debuted, right?
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Chris” and “Mike D” for the heads up.]
