One of the peculiarities regarding Apple’s new map at its launch was that it seemed to ship with two different sets of 3D buildings.

One set, which encompassed the vast majority of the new map’s 3D buildings, was generally simpler than the 3D buildings appearing on Google Maps:

But there was also a second, much smaller set of buildings that was noticeably more detailed than Google’s buildings:¹

One such building from this set was San Francisco’s baseball stadium, Oracle Park (formerly AT&T Park)—which was modeled to such a degree that even the “CocaCola bottle” (a children’s slide) was included:

This was in stark contrast to the map’s other 3D buildings, like San Jose City Hall, which were often coarsely modeled and missing key features (e.g., San Jose City Hall’s iconic dome):

So why did Apple’s new map seem to have two sets of 3D buildings—one simple and one super detailed?

One theory, back in 2018, was that Apple’s highly detailed buildings were being modeled by 3D artists. And while some initially dismissed this theory, we’re now seeing confirmation that this is actually what was happening.

On February 23, 2021, the game development studio Virtuos posted updates on its LinkedIn and Twitter profiles taking credit for the highly detailed buildings on Apple’s new map:²

Virtuos is now the third company that we know of (along with RMSI and Apex Systems) that aspects of Apple’s mapmaking have been outsourced to. And this raises questions regarding Apple’s overall mapmaking effort.

Specifically, how much of Apple’s mapmaking has been outsourced to third parties? And to what degree is Apple’s mapmaking manual vs. automated?^{3, 4}

None of this is meant as a knock against Apple—rather, it’s to assess how quickly Apple can continue to scale up its mapmaking processes, given that its new map covers just 12.5% of Earth’s land area after more than 6½ years of development.

Hopefully, all of this manually-created data is being used as a training set for algorithms that will accelerate Apple’s mapmaking effort.

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1  Here’s a quick way to find these highly detailed buildings: they appear a zoom-level earlier than the map’s other buildings:

And they also look slightly darker than the map’s other buildings:

Note: some of these highly detailed buildings, like Dodger Stadium, were added months after Apple’s new map was expanded to their respective areas:

And there are also a number of them, like the Taj Mahal, that are outside of the new map’s coverage area:

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2  It’s interesting to see that Virtuos is also taking credit for some of Apple Maps’s “road features”. ↩︎

3  Another question I have: did Virtuos also create Apple’s indoor maps of shopping malls and airports?

Like Apple’s other custom buildings, they also appear a zoom-level earlier:

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4  Google, for instance, was using computer vision techniques to extract detailed 3D models from its aerial imagery at least as early as 2014.

But Apple, even in its most recent release in Canada, still seems to be manually brute-forcing the creation of 3D landmarks:

So it’s unclear if Apple can scale as quickly as Google did.↩︎

UPDATE | February 24, 2021

Virtuos’s LinkedIn and Twitter posts about Apple’s 3D buildings have been quietly removed.