Beautifully Warped Landscapes From Apple’s Glitchy Maps App

Peder Norrby collects screenshots of glitches in Apple Maps. Image: Peder Norrby

 

Of the handful of self-inflicted blunders Apple’s had to deal with over the last few years, the Apple Maps debacle stands apart simply because it was so hard to miss. Where Antennagate had been an invisible plague and Ping was almost instantaneously forgotten, Apple Maps announced its screwiness from day one, unapologetically misplacing businesses and matter-of-factly routing drivers into nearby bodies of water. You didn’t have to poke and prod to find bugs. It was swarming with them.

The app’s 3D views were problematic too. Cities were peppered with warped buildings and other strange Daliesque distortions. For a user named Peder Norrby, though, those visual hiccups had an odd effect. They made him use the app more.

Norrby, an engineer who specializes in graphics software, first happened upon one of the app’s broken landscapes when he was using it to explore his hometown of Stockholm. Next to a red-roofed housing complex, there was an obvious snag. A solid street was smeared, like someone had run a sponge across a daub of wet paint. Norrby thought it looked cool, so he took a screenshot, uploaded it to Flickr, and gave it the somewhat cryptic title of “The Drop.”

Since then, Norrby has uploaded some 40 screenshots to the collection, curating his own bizarre gallery of Apple’s misfit renders. The errors are various. Shipping containers take on a strange, silly string webbing; trees slide sludge-like into city blocks; apartment buildings melt like crayons left in the sun.

Of course, as a graphics engineer, Norrby has some insight into what’s going on in these cases. Basically, the maps software has to render 3D geometries from 2D images, and sometimes it gets confused (Google Maps isn’t immune either). Norrby’s sympathetic to the challenge. “That is really hard to do, especially for complex shapes,” he explains. “I think they are actually doing a great job! But sometimes errors happen, and sometimes they look hilarious, wonderful, or interesting.”

They might be stuck at the gate for a while. Screenshot: Peder Norrby

Part of the appeal is purely aesthetic. Norrby occasionally adds Instagram filters or does some post-processing in Photoshop to give the screenshots a bit of flair. But the project is also about documenting and appreciating the serendipitous goofs unique to our technological moment. “I like the idea of looking at an error as something good or at least interesting,” Norrby says. “It happens a lot in art and coding that the mistakes we make turn out really great.” And while Apple’s engineers have been scrambling to fix the kinks wherever they pop up, Norrby thinks there’s something a little bit perfect about these algorithmically-authored oddities. “I like that the errors aren’t intentional,” he says. “It wouldn’t be the same for me if I had made those images in a 3D graphics app.”