Apple is testing all sorts of new features for the latest iteration of its operating system for iPhone and iPad.
Some of the new additions to the platform were unveiled at the WWDC 2014 event earlier this month, inevitably ensuring developers around the world started playing around with various features available via beta access.
One such feature which was listed during a presentation at the event, but is yet to be made available for developers, was City Tours, a tool which resides within Maps on the handset or device and allows the user to fly around a destination in 3D and zoom in or out to different landmarks or streets.
An enterprising developer managed to hack into it somehow and took a quick tour:
On the one hand it's just a cute feature of the Maps app within the device - but with the bigger picture turned on for a moment you can perhaps see where this might lead.
It is not necessarily about the technology being used to recreate the "flyovers" (albeit pretty cool), but more about how it relates to the marketing of attractions, sights, restaurants, things to do, et al.
Once the product is full baked and available, it would seem obvious that destinations, attractions and other location-based, tourism-related things-to-do would be urging users to check things out beforehand on a map, which happens to include a flyover.
But others are doing this already, is if the obvious reaction.
Yes, of course, but none of those are automatically integrated into one of the most commonly used native apps on the iPhone.