I saw an Apple "street view" car in Chicago yesterday, looked to be one of the newest model Toyota Priuses. Honestly had no clue Apple was in the street level imaging space until I saw that car and started looking around the web to learn more.
It turns out, and to answer your question more directly, 2019 is apparently a pilot year for a lot of initiatives with Apple Maps. It's got my curiosity, that's for sure.
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:
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.
Apple's new "look around" street view competitor looks really impressive.
That's something that stood out immediately as it passed, their camera dome was actively spinning, at a pretty high RPM. Unsure if Google Maps cars are using similar technology, or if their imaging apparatus is still one pod with multiple cameras placed along laterally-I haven't seen one here recently.
