Street names on the map when you zoom in
Open the map, zoom into a city and until today you got a photo with almost nothing written on it. Our own layer named capitals, regional centres and big towns, and that was it. Below city level you couldn't tell which district you were looking at, which road ran along the river or where the main station was. The satellite tiles carry no text, so the closer you got, the emptier the map felt.
From zoom 12 the satellite map now has its own label layer. At 12 you see districts, suburbs, airports and peaks. Around 13 and 14 the neighbourhoods, train and metro stations, lakes, rivers and parks come in. From 15 you get street names, drawn along the street, and from 17 the individual places on them. In Hamburg at zoom 14 that means Sankt Pauli, HafenCity, the Alster and the Hauptbahnhof; at 16 you can follow the Reeperbahn.
Tap a label
Every label is a real point, not part of a picture. Tap one and a small card opens with the name, what it is and its coordinates. From there you can fly to it, or save it to your places if you're signed in. When the label is an airport we have a page for, the name links to that page. Airports get a page once someone has caught a flight going there, so most small airfields won't have one yet, and the card simply doesn't offer a link it can't keep.
Labels come in your language where OpenStreetMap has a name for it, so Munich reads München in German and Мюнхен in Ukrainian. Where there is no translation you get the local name.
Above zoom 12 nothing changed. You still see our own capitals and regional centres there. Once the street layer takes over, our city names step aside so every city isn't written twice. On the street-style map (the map button on the right) OpenStreetMap's own labels are already part of the tiles, so this layer stays off.
Switch them off
If you'd rather look at the photo alone, open Layers on the map and untick "Street & place names". Up close you then get our city names back and nothing else.
Your layer choices now stay with your account, not with the browser. That covers this switch and every other one in the Layers panel: ships, the live sky, spots, your places, time zones and the night shade. Turn the time zones on in the game and they're on at skydex.online/map, on your phone, and in the headset. Whatever you had set in this browser before today is carried over the first time you load the page.
Where the names come from
The data is OpenStreetMap, served as vector tiles by OpenFreeMap, a free public tile service under an open licence. Your browser loads those tiles directly. The credit in the corner of the map now names both: Esri for the photos, OpenMapTiles and OpenStreetMap for the labels.
A readable map in VR
The map panel in the headset used to be a small blurry copy of the minimap. It now has its own canvas at twice the resolution, zoomed one step further in, and shows the same street layer when you're close enough. It's still a panel next to you rather than a full map you can pan around, but you can read street names on it. We haven't tried it in a headset yet, so tell us how it looks.