Is Maps going to become a cutting edge Vision Pro service?

Does Apple hope to make mixed reality access to art galleries and museums from within Maps a keynote feature for new services within Vision Pro? If not, why not?

Spending time at the gallery

Look at it this way: Apple has put 3D building structures within the detailed city experiences it has been weaving inside Maps for the last few years. While these maps aren’t yet available in every region availability is increasing fast. More recently, it has added guides and improved the tools it makes available to businesses with which to claim and curate their online identity within Maps.

Apple’s Maps are arguably now superior to those from Google.

Use them today and you experience Maps full of rich details, sidewalks, trees, buildings and 3D models of key landmarks.  You also get rich images of many locations in Look Around. Up next? An Autoevolutionwriter thinks Apple has something in mind. He’s spotted 3D building models in Maps that are a different color from existing designs – might these buildings be placeholders for a new service?

Exploring reality in unreal places

Think how such a service might work.

Not only would you wear Vision Pro to explore streets using real images taken at street level, but in the 3D view you’d be able to familiarize yourself with a city, and potentially visit key buildings – potentially including exploring inside them.

And, if you are making those public exhibition spaces available in 3D, why not offer up digital versions of the exhibits on display in those places?

Sharing places

You may even be able to invite others to share the experience with you with FaceTime or initiate a 3D mixed reality conversation with your friends while wearing Vision Pro and spending the obligatory 30-seconds staring at the Mona Lisa.

Now, I don’t know at all if Apple plans to extend the plethora of content it now makes available from within Maps with a Vision Pro friendly service as described, but it seems pretty clear that this is something the company could begin to put together in partnership with institutions of this kind. It’s not even rocket science as Google has already done lots of groundwork.

Get real virtual today

Over the years Google has worked with many such spaces to create exhibits you can visit virtually, Apple’s simply offering a better way to interact with them.

Among many others, the Guggenheim, British Museum, Musée D’Orsay, Rijksmuseum, and J. Paul Getty Museum all aoffer exhibits you can explore.

In June 2021, the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris launched a highly praised Augmented Reality experience called Revivre that let people meet extinct dinosaurs.

Speaking of dinosaurs, the ideas that lead toward the digitization of all human history at a time of threatening global disunity and accelerating climate change lends sadness, urgency, and necessity to these ideas.

Dreaming impossible dreams

You can expect lots of activity from Apple in the coming months as it seeks to inspire developers to build fantastic mixed reality experiences while also encouraging the wider public to consider how these can be improved and applied.

With those aims in mind it is inevitable that every internal group at Apple will have been given permission and a little budget to begin building ambitious new services that leverage their own existing business units skills while also nurturing new ideas on Vision Pro.

Why wouldn’t the Maps team have something to offer?

Putting Apple Reality on the Map

It’s far more likely they do than that they don’t.

After all, internally and externally, Apple wants developers to fire up their imaginations to invent post-smartphone era products. “We really try to stress the importance of creating new experiences that take advantage of all those capabilities,” said Apple’s Senior Director of Product Marketing for Apple Vision Pro, Steve Sinclair.

Melding Maps with Vision OS seems an obvious place in which different capabilities may be exploited for stunning impact to me. And, as Maps is server-based, there’s the advantage that not too much needs to slip within beta code. Perhaps we shall learn more next week.

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