On June 29, 2020, Apple released “Look Around” for the Seattle area:

Covering 74% of the population of the Seattle metropolitan area (and 39% of the population of the State of Washington), this latest release is Apple’s second largest in terms of land area:

And it brings the total number of Look Around areas to eleven:

Together, these eleven areas cover 0.4% of the U.S.’s land area and 14.7% of the U.S.’s population:

There’s such a large difference between area and population because nine of the eleven areas that Apple has released are among the U.S.’s fourteen largest urban regions:¹

The only exceptions are Las Vegas and Honolulu. While these two areas also have high populations, they’re not nearly as populous as Apple’s other Look Around areas—ranking just #31 and #62, respectively, among U.S. urban regions:

But while Las Vegas and Honolulu have relatively fewer residents than Apple’s other Look Around areas, it’s quite a different story in terms of tourists and visitors. Here, Las Vegas and Honolulu rank #6th and #7th:

So even though Las Vegas and Honolulu have smaller resident populations than Apple’s other Look Around areas, there’s still a high number of people (and a high number of iPhone users) in these areas at a given time.

One of the things that makes Apple’s Look Around imagery so interesting is the kind of features that can be built out of it. Google, for instance, uses Street View imagery to help power its AR navigation feature, “Live View”:

And Street View imagery is so important to Google’s AR implementation that Live View isn’t available in areas without it:

During WWDC 2020, we saw hints that Apple is taking a similar approach. Specifically, ARKit’s new “Location Anchor” feature appears to be enhanced by—and maybe even directly dependent upon—Apple Maps’s Look Around imagery for localization:

To place location anchors with precision, geo tracking requires a better understanding of the user’s geographic location than is possible with GPS alone. Based on a particular GPS coordinate, ARKit downloads batches of imagery that depict the physical environment in that area and assist the session with determining the user’s precise geographic location.

This localization imagery captures the view mostly from public streets and routes accessible by car. As a result, geo tracking doesn’t support areas within the city that are gated or accessible only to pedestrians, as ARKit lacks localization imagery there.

Because localization imagery depicts specific regions on the map, geo tracking only supports areas only from which Apple has collected localization imagery in advance.

But this isn’t the only new feature that Apple’s Look Around imagery appears to be powering. As part of iOS 14, Apple also released a new “Refine Location” feature...

...and, according to TechCrunch, this feature uses Look Around imagery to help determine user locations in areas with poor GPS signals (typically areas with lots of tall buildings).

If we look at U.S. cities with lots of tall buildings, we see an interesting pattern: all but one of Apple’s eleven Look Around areas appear on this list:²

This suggests that Apple might be prioritizing areas with lots of tall buildings as it rolls out Look Around, in order to support its “Refine Location” feature.

And it would also explain why, up until now, Apple has only released the central parts of many metropolitan areas (as it did with Los Angeles and New York):

If Apple is in fact targeting cities with large numbers of tall buildings, then it also makes it easy to see why Apple recently told TechCrunch that it’s planning to release Look Around for major Japanese cities later this year:

On average, Apple has been releasing new Look Around areas every 68 days:

So given past patterns, Apple’s next Look Around areas are likely to be released sometime between mid August and late September.

Then again, there’s reason to expect at least one new Look Around area even sooner...

During Apple’s “Explore ARKit 4” WWDC 2020 session, Apple announced that San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami would be the first five areas with support for ARKit’s new “Location Anchor” feature.

As we saw earlier, Location Anchors seem to be enhanced by—and maybe even directly dependent upon—Apple’s Look Around imagery.

While we don’t know when Apple’s WWDC sessions were recorded, this seems to suggest that Apple had expected Look Around imagery for Miami to have been released by the time of WWDC.

In other words, Apple might release Look Around for the Miami area in the near future.

Speaking of AR and WWDC, it’s a bit surprising that Apple didn’t announce an AR navigation feature for Apple Maps at this year’s WWDC.

Google Maps first added AR navigation for select users in February 2019 and then later released it for all iOS and Android users in August 2019.

Apple has shown strong interest in AR since first unveiling ARKit at WWDC 2017. And from a purely technical standpoint, Apple would seem to have everything it needs to add AR navigation to Apple Maps.

So it seems as if Apple is waiting for something... but what?

Similar to how Google’s AR implementation is dependent upon Street View, it’s likely that Apple’s would also only work in areas where Apple already has Look Around. As we saw earlier, Apple has released Look Around for just eleven areas...

...and together, these areas cover less than 15% of the U.S population:

So one possibility is that Apple is holding off on launching AR navigation until additional Look Around areas come online.

Another possibility is that Apple is waiting until LiDAR-capable camera systems are added to iPhones. Earlier this year, Apple added a “breakthrough LiDAR Scanner” to its iPad Pro models—and this same technology is rumored to be coming to this year’s iPhones.

AR navigation would make for an interesting demo of a “breakthrough LiDAR Scanner”, so there seems to be at least an outside chance of AR navigation being added to Apple Maps later this year. And if this were to happen, it also seems within the realm of possibly that Apple would dramatically expand its Look Around coverage.

Given that ARKit’s new Location Anchors are currently supported in Miami (but that there hasn’t yet been a Look Around release for Miami), it’s possible that Apple has a number of “finished”—but unreleased—Look Around areas that it’s deliberately withholding until a later date...

...and this date could be the launch of new iPhone hardware.

Of course, all of this is just speculation. But as long as we’re speculating, let’s try to guess Apple’s next Look Around areas...

While there aren’t many similarities amongst Apple’s eleven current Look Around cities, something they do have in common is that they’ve all been visited by Apple Maps’s pedestrian imagery collection effort:

They’re all also highly visited by travelers and tourists—with each area receiving more than half a million international visitors annually:

And with the exceptions of Las Vegas and Honolulu, they all have populations of five million or more:

And as we saw earlier, with the exception of Washington, they all have at least 50 skyscrapers (likely in support of iOS 14’s “Refine Location” feature):

So this gives us a handful of factors to examine. And when we look at all of the areas where Apple has collected pedestrian imagery—but hasn’t yet released Look Around—some interesting patterns emerge:

All of this suggests that Atlanta, Dallas, and Miami have the highest likelihood of being Apple’s next Look Around areas—followed by Phoenix and San Diego.

Meanwhile, Albuquerque, Austin, Buffalo, Denver, Jacksonville, Kansas City, New Orleans, Salt Lake City, and the Tampa Bay Area also seem to have higher than average chances.

__

1  Given that the current U.S. government “metropolitan” and “urban area” definitions break the San Francisco Bay Area into multiple areas, I’ve instead opted to use the U.S. government’s “primary statisical area” definitions, which I refer to as “urban regions”. ↩︎

2  The only Look Around city not listed is Washington, which doesn’t really have any skyscrapers, except for the Washington Monument.

But there’s also something else interesting about Washington: it’s the only Look Around city that doesn’t have Flyover imagery. So even though Washington doesn’t have particularly tall buildings, Apple needed to collect “3D” imagery there (since it didn’t already have any from Flyover). ↩︎