Apple Maps Now Shows Apple Park 3D Models, Campus Walkways

Now if only Apple maps would actually cover the rest of the country it would be useful

Whatever you think of Apple Maps, Apple Park coverage has been excellent.

Well, ok. I'm sure Apple took extra care to ensure the mapping was accurate down to the last mm!

I still don't trust Apple maps and doesn't cover enough modes of transport and have long since removed the app icon from my phone.

Considering not a single normal soul will be allowed in the park, they might have just well covered area 51.

That's most certainly not true. There is an Apple Store and a café that are open to the public.

They didn't update the app, they updated the server database with 3D data :rolleyes:

Apple will probably include some sort of locator function in an employee-only iOS app that's tied to iBeacons.

I'm sure there would be signage as well, like in an airport terminal or train station.

The first couple of weeks, I figure some people will accidentally walk into the wrong cubicle, but those are growing pains associated with any sort of move, not just Apple Park. I tend to bump into walls in a new place when I'm trying to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

:D

Different venues have different seating chart systems based on what works for the venue. Having three digit numerical sections works well in multi-level facility. It's really not that different as having apartment or hotel rooms with the room number's first digit indicating the floor number. In many places, the odd number rooms would be in one wing, the even number rooms would be in the other wing, so rooms 411 and 413 might be neighbors on the same floor.

In some concert venues, the seat rows are alphabetical and the seats themselves are numerical. At at least one symphony hall, orchestra seat A101 is first row, center seat. In another venue, seat A01 might be the seat closest to one of the side aisles.

There are plenty of location naming systems, no one best way to do things for every venue.

I wonder how they'll map out the building.

Typically, in squarish buildings, it's like Battleship, where I may be at location 5P4, where the first digit is the floor number, and the P4 is an XY coordinate.

For me, it makes sense to have a system like a 360 degree, but do you use magnetic north (easy if you have a phone, but changes - ask a pilot) or true north?

Something like Floor Lettered Distance Radial, so 4S270 would be on the west side, a considerable distance from the center of the circle, on the 4th floor.

Rectangular coordinates wouldn't work so well, as there would be gaps in the coverage, and gridding out a circular building makes it harder to find something. I've seen stadia with their systems, but they seem to be more of a system that makes sense to them (i.e. circular alphabet and hundreds for the level.)

I like using degrees as markers. They could also create section names since that's usually a little easier for most people to understand.

I'm wondering if we'll hear about an internal app that using the tech form the indoor mapping companies they've purchased so you can, say, look an internal email footer of a person, click on their office or the conference room they want you to meet at, and having it direct you how to get there, show you a map, and tell you how long it will take to walk there.

The biggest need will likely be for the employees parking under the ring who want to park closest to their workspace. After that it's probably fairly simple to navigate.

Aerial overhead photography can useful, but it also has its shortcomings.

Actually, it's rather hard to tell from Google Earth about land usage advantage since A.) you don't see the number of stories the building has, and B.) it doesn't indicate the size of the underground parking facilities (nor the capacity of the two above-ground parking garages on the southern perimeter).

The old HP complex was a typical Silicon Valley corporate campus (maybe one or two stories), plus ground level parking on wide swaths of asphalt.

What won't show up on aerial photography at all is the traffic impact on the higher-occupancy Apple Park complex.

There will be more people at Apple Park than the old HP campus, but the freeway isn't any wider nor are the bordering surface streets (North Wolfe Road, Homestead Road, Tantau Avenue). There is no rail-based mass transit (Caltrain, VTA Light Rail) and none of the three aforementioned streets are really great bicycle throughways.

North Tantau Avenue does not have its own freeway off-ramp so the bulk of the traffic will be from the North Wolfe exit (traffic from the north/San Francisco) and Lawrence Expressway (traffic from the south/San Jose).

There is a large hospital (Kaiser Permanente) at the corner of Homestead and Lawrence, so before a single Apple employee drives to the new Apple Park, there is already a fair amount of traffic on these streets.

There's a decidedly moribund shopping mall (Vallco Park) just south of I-280. If that ever picks up again, again that will drive more traffic to these freeway exits.

Best to stay away from this area during rush hour. It's gonna be a cluster.

The people who are really screwed are the apartment residents in the southwestern section. Unless you live there and work at Apple Park, it's going to hell on weekdays. Also, the apartment residents have lost easy access to the east. Pruneridge Avenue no longer bisects the Apple property, those residents will be forced to turn right onto North Wolfe and right again onto Homestead.

For sure, Apple is sticking a heck of a lot more people in the new development, but with that comes its own set of issues.

I thought radians were used along the circumference. I meant a radial, which would be a point from the center of the circle to the circumference. I may have gotten my jargon messed up.

Radial - adj. of or arranged like rays or the radii of a circle; diverging in lines from a common center.
Radian - noun - a unit of angle, equal to an angle at the center of a circle whose arc is equal in length to the radius
I think I was misusing radials as a noun, instead of an adjective.

**EDIT**
Yeah... I never got Radians for engineering. I understand the use, as it is a direct relationship in the circle, but having been a Boy Scout, degrees makes sense for me.
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I understand what you mean (overthinking... honey, is that you???), but I happen (at the moment) to work in the world's largest building (by volume), and having an exact place to find people, or conference rooms is critical. If someone says, "I'm in conference room 511P6 in the factory," anyone that has the basic (it's the same across the corporation) understanding can know that it's on the 5th floor (the 5 in 511), in XY coordinate P6.

I was just hoping to have a consistency and commonality between round buildings. This way, when Apple has another round building, the mapping is consistent.

As for the football (American or Worldwide) stadia, those get kind of goofy. I've been in those where there are numbers for the sections, letters, and other variations...

You could used normalised coordinates so each room would have Rho (meters) and Theta (radians) so you can identify any point.

I wonder how they'll map out the building.

Typically, in squarish buildings, it's like Battleship, where I may be at location 5P4, where the first digit is the floor number, and the P4 is an XY coordinate.

For me, it makes sense to have a system like a 360 degree, but do you use magnetic north (easy if you have a phone, but changes - ask a pilot) or true north?

Something like Floor Lettered Distance Radial, so 4S270 would be on the west side, a considerable distance from the center of the circle, on the 4th floor.

Rectangular coordinates wouldn't work so well, as there would be gaps in the coverage, and gridding out a circular building makes it harder to find something. I've seen stadia with their systems, but they seem to be more of a system that makes sense to them (i.e. circular alphabet and hundreds for the level.)