Apple Maps backpackers are marching across the UK

Apple has quite literally reached the end of the UK road, and is now despatching an army of Apple Maps backpackers to survey pedestrianized areas its car fleet couldn’t reach, Evening Standard says.

Watch out for the Apple Maps backpack

The company is sending ground survey teams out across London, Birmingham, and Manchester. You can also expect to see them in Berkshire, Staffordshire and the West Midlands. Team members are equipped with special mapping data backpacks and will explore places in those cities that cars could not go.

The backpacks carry cameras and other sensors for maps data collection.

These tools are the portable equivalents of those you find inside Apple’s car-based Maps teams.

The project means we can look forward to exploring more of those cities when using Apple’s Look Around feature. Hopefully you’ll be able to sit in the center of parks, stadiums and other public spaces inaccessible by road. The work also means we’ll get more accurate maps fo those places.

Apple’s Maps backpacking teams will begin to appear in those cities starting today and the project is likely to last into May.

What do the backpacks look like?

The packs will likely look like this, which is a recently updated version of them:

When you see an Apple Maps camera backpack while on vacation in Southern California naturally you run after it so you can be in the shots / ask questions pic.twitter.com/Vs2SzBGbr6

— Joanna Stern (@JoannaStern) April 7, 2021

But they may also look like this earlier iteration:

Apple is conducting ground surveys with vehicles around the world to collect data to improve Apple Maps and to support the Look Around feature.

Apple says: “These pedestrian surveys allow us to improve and update Apple Maps in areas where vehicles simply can’t go while using the same privacy protections as the Apple Maps vehicles.”

Apple will censor faces and license plates on images that are published in Look Around.

(This is not the first time the Maps teams have been sent out to gather additional information. We last saw them prowling London’s streets in 2019 prior to another Maps update).

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