lookaround-map is a web app for viewing Apple Look Around panoramas on any platform, using reverse-engineered requests to Apple's internal Maps API.
Please don't make automated requests against prod. Check if my Python library streetlevel satisfies your usecase, and if not, set up a local instance of the server to make requests against instead.
- View panoramas in any modern browser, on any device
- Custom blue line layer which displays the full extent of the coverage at all zoom levels
- See the exact positions of panoramas at z >= 16
- Color or filter the coverage layers by type or date
- View metadata Apple Maps doesn't show you: panorama ID, elevation, full capture date and time
- Save a screenshot of the viewport
- Open the current view in Apple Maps or Google Street View
The panorama viewer can be embedded into another web page. Check out the sample code here.
git clone https://github.com/sk-zk/lookaround-map.git --recursive
cd lookaround-map
pip install -r requirements.txt
npm i --global rollup
npm i
rollup -c
flask runIn any browser which doesn't natively support HEIC (which is every browser except Safari 17+), the panorama faces must be decoded by the app itself. By default, this is done clientside using libheif-js, but a serverside JPEG conversion is provided as a fallback. For this to work, one of these three libraries must be installed. Simply install the one you like and it will be selected automatically.
#1: By default, pillow-heif will be used to decode images. Supports Linux, Mac and Windows.
#2: pyheif used to be faster than pillow-heif and is supported for this reason. Supports Linux and Mac.
#3: However, the fastest option (that I'm aware of) is my own heic2rgb, which is noticeably faster than the previous two. Supports Linux and Windows.
- Decode the official blue line layer
- Not hugely important because I've got my own, but it would be nice as fallback and for whenever an update drops
- Out of all the network requests that happen when you tap the Look Around button, the most likely candidate for containing that information is style 53 at z=15 specifically.
- Vector tiles are in Apple's custom
VMP4format. The general structure of the format has been decoded, but the actual content of the individual sections has not, and a quick glance at Ghidra's decompiler output for the parsing functions makes me put this one in the "let's get back to this in another year or two" category.
- Decode the mesh, render it, and use it to improve movement etc.
- There are three types of pano data Apple Maps will request. One is
/t/<face>/<zoom>, which returns the pano faces as HEIC, but there are two others:/m/<zoom>and/mt/7, in a custom container format starting with the magic stringMCP4. These files contain the mesh, compressed with Edgebreaker. I can decode the CLERS string, but I have not yet been able to make sense of how vertices are encoded in this format.
- There are three types of pano data Apple Maps will request. One is
- Add PoIs
- Everyone's least favorite feature, but it makes sense to add it for completion's sake.