Yeah go ahead and completely change the scale of what I’m looking at a night quite predictable time just as I’m about to need the map the most to make a turn on a street I’m not familiar with
Absolutely fucking brilliant idea
This is why I use Apple Maps and thankfully in the Bay Area it’s more than at parity, it’s frankly better
All that said, this UI is actually awesome - just needs a little tweaking for the turn animation but I’d 100% use this - incredibly intuitive
It never got past 0% on FLX1S; Firefox.
My immediate thought is that this is what is would be like to drive in The Spindle in Neuromancer or any similar space environment that’s spinning for artificial gravity.
My thoughts from the time: if it's just [something like the linked implementation], there's a limited view of the way ahead, so it's better if you can give it a non-linear scale.
Upcoming turns also hide a lot of the real way ahead, so it's better to if you can increase horizontal visibility too.
How do you have non-constant scale on both axes? How to make this useful for navigation?
I may play with this idea again given that vibe coding has given me time for such experiments.
However, I also wouldn't bother with the full 3D rendering, I'd just use a normal map. There's several reasons why normal maps don't tend to include every bush, every letter box on every building.
I suppose Google could do something like that with their own data.
Not sure if this is meant to be practical, but I think this would work better if the upcoming turn was centered in the view once it’s within a certain range, as a kind of anticipation. This helps prepare for the jarring shift in perspective and, in case there’s multiple turns in short succession (as there might be when exiting a highway, for instance), gives you a visual heads-up about what’s next.
While it's neat, it's neat on the order of a UX idea someone might just come up with at standup one day. Like, cool, worth an A/B test, but worth a patent? I don't think so.
I am genuinely annoyed when someone gets a helpful UI idea and their immediate thought is "wow, I should patent this so I can monopolize this helpful idea".
I'm fortunate to not suffer motion sickness in general, but I showed this to my wife for 5 seconds and she was feeling motion sick.
Personally, I love it. It's fun, and I look forward to using it one day in lieu of exclusively top down or forward angled alone nav tools.
That being said, it is a little dizzying to watch.
It runs about as well in Chrome as in Firefox for me, so I don't think this will work particularly well on any phone at the moment.
And it's getting so much easier to create them too.
what about steep uphill/downhill sections ?
And likely in most EVs.
It's completely wild that they're trying to patent a visualization that already existed in multiple movies.
https://berglondon.com/blog/2009/05/04/here-there-influences...
Just checked again, and it's verbatim this use case and even active until 2030 still:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20100305853A1/en
3-D map display
Abstract
A computer generated 3-dimensional map display includes a reference icon identifying an observation point in the geographic area defined by the map, the map being presented on a curved surface which extends from a first plane to a second plane which is substantially orthogonal to the first plane. The observation point is located in the first plane. The display is configured such that the height of landmarks and buildings in a defined foreground of the reference icon are presented normal to the first plane, the height of land marks and buildings at a defined far distance are presented normal to the second plane and the height of land marks and buildings in a defined middle ground are presented normal to the non-linear portion of the curved surface. The geographic area represented can be translated along the curved surface to provide a perception that the reference icon is roaming through the displayed geographic area.
By no other than "Here and There" Schulze and Webb Ltd later rebranded to BERG.
The generic use case of a multiperspective camera method for that was arguable covered in a 1997 Disney paper latest.
Multiperspective Panoramas for Cel Animation https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall00/cs597b/p...
But if it's not vibecoded landing page, they might also know that they have a dummy patent request that will probably be rejected but that probably in so many month that they can use the patent pending to get commercial and investment traction till then.
Having said that, the novelty is questionable since the projection is pretty well-known and creating a functional proof of concept that solves many of the patent's problems likely takes a day or so. But I'm not a lawyer so what do I know in this department?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave...
Something about the moment of the turn itself isn’t working for me though. Just before the turn you have essentially no information about the route ahead, until after the turn is completed. This would make a sequence of consecutive turns difficult to navigate.
I think where the actual distraction is comes from the level of detail. It would actually benefit from just having silhouettes or lower resolution “suggestions” of what’s there. It’s maybe just the buildings on the corners of turns or specific landmarks you’d want fully rendered so people could follow ambiguous directions like “Turn left at church, but not the Methodist church the Episcopal one!”
Even aside from that, the constant feeling of going downhill would be off-putting to me.
Having recently driven in Boston[1], the problem is that Google Maps tells you what lane you need to be in when the route divergence happens... it doesn't tell you what lane you need to be in to get to that lane.
So I would see guidance like be in the first or second lane (from the left) to make this left turn and all seemed well since I was in the second lane from the left. Then two more lanes merged in from the left and I had to get over two lanes and ended up on a two mile onramp for the highway to New Hampshire.
I see the same things locally, but it's not as obviously bad because I'm familiar with the local highways and also most of the local highways aren't as space constrained so there's almost always plenty of time to merge.
[1] I don't recommend it... we should have driven to the airport and returned our car and taken transit back to our hotel
I could see it being useful for a more exploratory style of map, however. Games like Pokemon Go come to mind as a place where this would be pretty cool.
I have this issue with literally every modern nav system. They all make their fundamental display a line marked on a map, and most of the information on that map is irrelevant.
More than 20 years ago I had some kind of Verizon flip-open phone with a QWERTY keyboard. No idea what model, but it had this fabulous nav interface that just showed big arrows showing your next two turns and a schematic diagram of what the next turn would look like. I wish I could get something like that, but with Google's data as the back end.
Proposal: The use case is to inform the user of landmarks on the route before they need them, giving visual cues about the scenery.
It's missing an early distortion along the direction of the turn though, each turn feels jarring and drops the useful spatial awareness aspect.
One classic: there's a fork in the road on the way to my parents. One side is "straight", the other side is an exit. I took the wrong, exit side of that several times while my app said to go straight before I just knew the route and didn't need GPS at all. Top-down isn't as good in these cases because of densely packed roads and back to back exits.
That said, it's "good enough" and I doubt this takes off.
I don't see much added value with this particular nausea-inducing approach. It falls into the category of "You should've thought less about whether you could and more about whether you should."
but this seems to me just a topdown and "third person" at the same time through the distortion, I don't see how it helps with knowing exactly where to turn, is it because it shows the way further down the turn (like, sideways after the turn in the demo) ?
TIL Software Patents are still totally a thing in Europe via a back door.
200 people or 100k people wouldn't matter then, it'll be cached.
It will also make the download based almost entirely on client download speed.
Any patent attorneys here know what exactly about this is "patent-able"?
All we know is that they've applied for a patent. If the patent they seek is granted, then it will be published and there will be no mystery about what it covers. :)
But estimating distances is hard, as is estimating road size. You can only plan one straight line ahead, and there's no "glance how many blocks before I make a left turn". Now it's "scan and process the entire straight terrain section with eyes recognizing crossings to get the count" Alternatively, I'll have to task switch all the time to it to not miss on the turn. Some hybrid map visual overlay that makes reading it at a glance easier would go a long way here.
It might be useful to be able to configure the map viewing angle at the top and bottom of the frame, perhaps even the degree of curvature between them.
I say this because I wonder if a shallower gradient (slightly more top-down at the bottom and slightly more angled at the top) would be more understandable and familiar while providing almost as much information. Not as cool-looking, but potentially more useful as a real navigation aid.
Now of course you could change the parameters so that the upper screen border is 3 kilometers. But normal standard perspective is even better, because it can show you up to infinity. The inherent concept here is that there is a cut-off at the top, and that there is always a lot of unnecessary stuff near you whizzing by to look at / dopamine kicks. So you would have to constantly look at the screen - instead of at the road.
Navigon (among others) back in 2009 showed a perspective that balanced between showing the next junction and the next few kilometers. And leaving out anything unnecessary. I like that better. Example: https://www.notebookcheck.com/fileadmin/_processed_/csm_Garm...
The cylindrical view makes the "wall" very legible, whereas with the bowl the far off intersection are not orthogonal in view. But I think the value of a transformation like this is making it easier to understand the next steps, not the further off landscape.
I've been meaning to vibecode a version that lifts and lowers different landscape sections based on relevance. If those ideas are interesting, give it a go!
Zero chance you can patent this though.
But as a tool for mapbuilders for small areas or planned tours i think this could be great
https://mrgris.com/projects/merc-extreme/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1256230/Hyperbolica/
Spherical Geometry Is Stranger Than Hyperbolic - Hyperbolica Devlog #2
I use map view / north is up, which makes it reasonably easy to get he big picture - I encourage everybody to try it :).
Here in the States, most of the roads are "owned" by the people and our various thousands of governmental jurisdictions do not tell anyone about these kinds of details in any uniform way.
We just kind of figure it out on our own.
Yes, this is how it's currently implemented. My proposal is "up is the intersection of the path with the edge of the screen". Here's a mock comparison of the current behavior with my proposal: https://i.imgur.com/AmUnzfS.jpeg (The mocked perspective is wrong because I just cut out and rotated the image, but hopefully you get the idea)
Let us embrace this minor imperfection by simply excluding U-turns from this presentation method.
It might be fine for pure navigation to addresses but business addresses and other metadata are often missing or out of date because people only bother to update Google Maps. Also that’s where all the reviews are.
I don’t want to use two different apps for navigation vs finding businesses.
Apart from needing to copy and paste destination addresses from Google/Google Maps every time I use Apple Maps, it's great.
Around here (Long Island, NY), it's far better than Google Maps, and I use it all the time.
I've heard that it falls down, in rural areas, though.
