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.

Edit: Apparently it is "Nova Map" base tile set from ArcGIS.

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.

Costa Rica seems also to have more coverage than I see here.

Paraguay too.

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

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: 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?

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.

Depending on where you live, that happened about 10 years ago.

Source: played a bunch of Kerbal space program

Mapillary (https://www.mapillary.com/) has surprisingly good coverage in some places, but the experience is lacking, partly because most of the images (where I've looked) aren't 360 views.

Antarctica is huge (1.5x the area of the US), it would be a dangerous logistical nightmare to fly the sorts of patterns you need to capture aerial imagery there, and it's almost entirely covered in non-descript ice -- what would be the value of having high-resolution imagery there?

El Salvador does have a decent amount of coverage on street view, but this was done by El Salvador Maps (if you pan the camera down, you'll see this name on the cars used to capture the coverage). The dataset is curated by a member of the Geoguessr community, in which "unofficial" coverage like this is disregarded, which is why you won't see it included.

It makes sense they prototyped it. But putting it into production is $$$, way more expensive than current street view.

Current street view works well enough. How is a massively upgraded 3D version, that is bloated and slower to use on older devices, going to make Google more money?

It feels more like a separate product to license to architecture firms, city planners, video game studios, etc.

https://duckdb.org/2025/05/19/the-lost-decade-of-small-data

We don't. State of the art imaging satellites are in ballpark of 20cm/px.

Here is what antarctica looks from a satellite: https://space-solutions.airbus.com/resources/satellite-image...