Tootfinder

Uniting the World by Dividing it: Federated Maps to Enable Spatial Applications
Sagar Bharadwaj, Srinivasan Seshan, Anthony Rowe
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11437

Uniting the World by Dividing it: Federated Maps to Enable Spatial Applications
The emergence of the Spatial Web -- the Web where content is tied to real-world locations has the potential to improve and enable many applications such as augmented reality, navigation, robotics, and more. The Spatial Web is missing a key ingredient that is impeding its growth -- a spatial naming system to resolve real-world locations to names. Today's spatial naming systems are digital maps such as Google and Apple maps. These maps and the location-based services provided on top of these maps…

Apple’s newest AI study unlocks street navigation for blind users #apple #ai https://9to5ma…

Apple’s newest AI study unlocks street view for blind users - 9to5Mac
SceneScout, combines Apple Maps with a multimodal LLM to provide interactive, AI-generated descriptions of street view images.

Why is My Route Different Today? An Algorithm for Explaining Route Selection
Aaron Schild, Sreenivas Gollapudi, Anupam Gupta, Kostas Kollias, Ali Sinop
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05604

Why is My Route Different Today? An Algorithm for Explaining Route Selection
Users of routing services like Apple Maps, Google Maps, and Waze frequently wonder why a given route is proposed. This question particularly arises when dynamic conditions like traffic and road closures cause unusual routes to be proposed. While many dynamic conditions may exist in a road network at any time, only a small fraction of those conditions are typically relevant to a given user's route. In this work, we introduce the concept of a simple valid explanation (SVE), which consists of a sm…

spotted the Apple Maps car, downtown.

The Apple Maps 3D model of London still includes the Marble Arch Mound, the city's stupidest tourist attraction.