A method for displaying a virtual object is disclosed, applied to an electronic device (10) having a display component (323) and a camera (324). The method includes: detecting an operation of starting an application by a user; in response to the operation, downloading a global submap and storing the global submap in a simultaneous localization and mapping SLAM system of the electronic device (10), where the global submap (123) is a submap corresponding to a location of the electronic device (10) in a global map; and displaying a location and a posture of the virtual object on the display component (323), where the location and the posture of the virtual object are obtained by performing pose calculation based on at least a video image collected by the camera (324) and the global submap (123).