2015-06-08　人氣：3192“The Marauder’s Map” Becomes True! Apple’s New Feature Allows Tracking Paths Taken by Friends

            Remember “The Marauder’s Map” in the fantasy novel “Harry Potter”? In the novel, whenever Harry Potter uses a spell to open the map, all the secret tunnels in Hogwarts will show up on the map, and the locations of specific people will show up too, together with their moving tracks. Isn’t it magical? Moreover, in the future, this function will show up in our iPhones.

Apple has been granted a new patent by USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) this Tuesday (March 24 2015). The new patent is titled “Sharing location information among devices”, which enables users to track the routes taken by another other people. For example, if a friend of a user is travelling or hiking, the user can take a “virtual trip” with his/her friend by tracking the current routes of his/hers. They can choose to mutually share their whereabouts.

The new patent is based on the old “Find My Friends” app. Apple takes mobile maps as an example, if two friends activate this new function when driving cars, they can view the driving route of one another. Besides, the users can as well activate the “mirroring mode”, and see what the other sees from his/her device.