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tomgp 9 hours ago [-]
First time I saw this idea was Berg's "Here and There" poster from 2009 (a year before Inception) though they acknowledge a bunch of earlier inspirations...
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.
The patent application is not yet publically available, so I can't tell what aspects of the system they are trying to protect. They probably have some narrowly tailored features that they can protect. Maybe related to the rendering, or some toggle button feature of the display. But, as to the broad concept of a curved hybrid combination of street view and overhead view, I agree that they will not be able to protect that aspect.
lynndotpy 6 hours ago [-]
Yep. First time I saw this idea was Animal Crossing: Wild Word's "rolling log" effect in 2005, albeit in reverse. (So you get a top-down view and a horizon view at the same time). Second time I saw this specific idea was a Minecraft vertex shader in 2013 with the "Acid Shaders" vertex transform shaders.
kouunji 2 hours ago [-]
Was thinking the same thing- I still have those posters and was thinking of them when I saw this was patent pending.
toypaj 7 hours ago [-]
Exactly what I thought of, I bought these posters at the time and they are still in the cardboard tube.
vinaigrette 7 hours ago [-]
Great memory, great reference!
Freedom2 4 hours ago [-]
I remember working on something like this as early as 1999! It was for a small European company, sadly we weren't able to put it out due to licensing restrictions at the time.
sd9 9 hours ago [-]
This is a really good proof of concept. I would use this.
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.
fishpen0 7 hours ago [-]
This is exactly why on traditional gps maps I prefer it to be very very zoomed out. It's far too common that mapping tools make something like a sudden second turn invisible to you until it is too late to switch lanes.
tshaddox 5 hours ago [-]
I find that Apple Maps is typically pretty smart with its automatic zoom. For a typical intersection with just one turn to navigate, it will zoom in to give you a good sense of the lanes, stop signs/lights, etc. But when there are consecutive turns to navigate, or a heavily curved section of road (like highway on-ramps) it will zoom out and even rotate the map to show that upcoming context.
tikotus 4 hours ago [-]
Apple Maps got really good at some point! I once pick it by accident for navigation, and never went back to Google Maps.
tshaddox 3 hours ago [-]
I've used it almost exclusively since around 2019, but that has been in the Bay Area and LA area where the data has presumably been very good relative to other areas.
ChrisMarshallNY 3 hours ago [-]
I think it may depend on where you are.
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.
irishcoffee 29 minutes ago [-]
I uninstalled Google Maps when it started draining my iPhone battery at an absurd rate. Apple Maps it is.
jerf 5 hours ago [-]
I remember for at least a while people would complain about how GPS navigation ruined their sense of the local area. Probably stopped hearing about it because people have just surrendered to the apps, but I think part of the reason is also that by default they were just zoomed in way too close. If you forced them back out a ways, I was actually learning a lot about my local area. Like, there's all these subdivisions around, you know, and from the outside who knows what connects to what, I'm not going to just duck in to a subdivision and physically navigate the streets to see how they're all connected, but driving around with the navigation made it much more clear... when it was zoomed out somewhat.
shrx 4 hours ago [-]
This is also a problem with Google Maps navigation. It is always showing the perspective looking straight ahead of your current direction, even when you're approaching a sharp turn. Instead, the perspective should be along a vector connecting your current location with the point where the navigation's path crosses the edge of the display, pointing straight up.
NikolaNovak 2 hours ago [-]
Took me a while to figure out what you're saying, now I assume you're using the "up is direction of motion"?
I use map view / north is up, which makes it reasonably easy to get he big picture - I encourage everybody to try it :).
kccqzy 4 hours ago [-]
That seems very wrong and unintuitive for U-turns.
ssl-3 4 hours ago [-]
It does.
Let us embrace this minor imperfection by simply excluding U-turns from this presentation method.
pishpash 4 hours ago [-]
So why not use 2D maps, have people lost the ability to read North up maps? I swear ever since paper maps have not been used in cars, people have gotten spatially dumber.
tonyarkles 3 hours ago [-]
I love north-up maps because I find they give me way better spatial context. My truck’s nav system gives north-up as an option but my phone and my truck map both suffer from the same problem on different axes. My phone sits in its holder vertically, so I have way more north-south context than east-west. The truck screen is landscape, same problem north-south! A square map north-up would be amazing!
orbital-decay 8 hours ago [-]
This looks pretty neat but also distracting and not very convenient. A useful follow mode should provide a view into the next several dozen seconds of road conditions. This projection forces road sections after sharp turns to go off screen, and does nothing to compensate for that (e.g. by rotating the view), so the distance and time of useful prediction changes constantly. Since you're already willing to give the driver nausea, consider unwrapping 90 degree turns into something more straight until they're close enough.
albrewer 5 hours ago [-]
I think it'd be pretty easy to fix, too. Have a point on the line that represents "10 seconds from now" and orient your camera along the line between that and the point representation of your car, with slow, smooth panning so as not to get jerky transitions. If "10 seconds from now" is within a certain range of the car, it ought to just default to whatever its doing now.
dwd 1 hours ago [-]
It could possibly be less nausea-inducing and make the turns less jarring if the follow pespective was slightly elevated and not at ground level.
cousinbryce 8 hours ago [-]
I found it useful because it shows context for the next turn and information about the street network near the next turn
I feel like video game logic would be useful here where a view like this would replace the main view and the “macro view” would be a minimap in the corner.
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!”
tantalor 9 hours ago [-]
I see a whole new business category being born: Nausea as a Service!
SrslyJosh 40 minutes ago [-]
Yes, I'm not normally prone to motion sickness, but the change of perspective during a turn is quite unpleasant.
rootusrootus 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah it made me feel the instant onset of what I recognize from vast personal experience as motion sickness. I would never be able to use this.
Even aside from that, the constant feeling of going downhill would be off-putting to me.
drob518 8 hours ago [-]
Yea, I felt like I was perpetually at the top of a roller coaster and going over the hump, but never finding the bottom. And I like roller coasters. But no thanks. Not even sure what the benefits of this view really are.
Foreskin_Mafia 5 hours ago [-]
Nausea as a service, while begging for investments...
krashidov 8 hours ago [-]
It's already been done - VR
blitzar 3 hours ago [-]
b-AR-f Bags - half surgical mask half airplane sick bag
Im clicking "Apply to YC" right now
leblancfg 7 hours ago [-]
Great idea and demo. My main gripe when using Google Maps in the car is lack of information about the next turns — when do I change lanes, and to which one? This could be natively addressed here, especially if the blue navigation line was a little thinner and showed which lane(s) the driver needs to take.
Carrok 7 hours ago [-]
This comment confuses me a bit because Google Maps (at least in the US, in my experience) is really great about telling you what lane to be in.
toast0 5 hours ago [-]
> Google Maps (at least in the US, in my experience) is really great about telling you what lane to be in.
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
6 hours ago [-]
6 hours ago [-]
leblancfg 7 hours ago [-]
I need to know what lane I'll need to be in next so I can plan in advance.
dhosek 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah, there’s a tendency not to know with sufficient time, especially with heavy traffic.
philistine 6 hours ago [-]
Not every road owner in the world has provided how many lanes a road has. To tell you which lane to stay in, it need to know how many there are!
ssl-3 4 hours ago [-]
Where in the world are these road owners, and do they really eve provide this kind of information to mapping companies?
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.
leblancfg 4 hours ago [-]
That's also where this map would help, it can definitely degrade gracefully. If I know I have two right-hand turns coming, I can take the decision for myself.
mthoms 3 hours ago [-]
This information is all derived from overhead (satellite and aerial) imagery combined with street level imagery (like from Google street view). No road owners required.
archonis 6 hours ago [-]
It fails the task as often as not on large East Coast highways. Not nearly as bad on the West Coast.
vessenes 10 hours ago [-]
This is cool. May I suggest that you make the standard deformation much less spherical? I do not get nauseous that easily and it made me a little nauseous, feeling like I was falling. I would not want to watch that while driving in a car. But 1/3 of the way from ‘flat’ to that would be super useful.
niek_pas 9 hours ago [-]
I'm with you on this. I think this could actually be really useful but the effect is way too extreme. Additionally, the animation is quite stuttery on turns --- might just be my machine though.
justusthane 9 hours ago [-]
Same. I don't get motion sick, and this made me feel uneasy. It would make my wife motion sick instantly. It's an interesting concept though, and I can see the utility of it.
Orbify_Karsten 9 hours ago [-]
thanks. Yes, youre not the first one saying that. Next demo update will have more options
goosejuice 9 hours ago [-]
Agreed. I have no problem with a tilt a whirl but this triggers something.
ChipopLeMoral 12 minutes ago [-]
This made me feel sick in 5 seconds.
kogus 8 hours ago [-]
I don't really know why, but the thought of my (elderly) mother using this made me laugh almost as hard as the El Risitas guy[1]. I adore it, and it also should never ever be used in any car GPS scenario. It's far too distracting, and puts far too much emphasis on the places you are not going.
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.
> far too much emphasis on the places you are not going
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.
anigbrowl 5 hours ago [-]
The concept is good, the implementation not so much, at least not on desktop. Mouselook doesn't make sense here; A and D should turn, not sidestep, which you can't do in a car. You do show a car right at the outset so people are going to imprint on that. Lack of arrow key support also alienates non-gamers.
krm01 5 hours ago [-]
This is surprisingly useful. As I was imagining myself behind thr wheel I felt it was more clear as to when/where the next turn is. Probably because it combines top down flat with 3d spatial vs just one or the other. This was really good. I want it.
HighGodLoki 9 hours ago [-]
That's almost perfect.
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.
jonash54 7 hours ago [-]
I miss such a landmark feature in all available routing apps and think it will become standard in selfdriving cars where there is more possibility for the driver to look around the landscape
Orbify_Karsten 11 hours ago [-]
Thanks for sharing! Building this in public, check my X for more updates! https://x.com/karshuit
dom96 2 hours ago [-]
Gets stuck loading at 90% for me
speby 2 hours ago [-]
Neat. Kinda novel. But sort of impractical and doesn't solve a problem anyone actually has with current navigation UIs. I still like it anyway.
lacoolj 6 hours ago [-]
Patent Pending?
Any patent attorneys here know what exactly about this is "patent-able"?
ssl-3 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe nothing here is patentable. We don't know yet.
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. :)
repeekad 6 hours ago [-]
My understanding of the legal field is it's less about the actual law and more about how much you're willing to spend.
Kim_Bruning 8 hours ago [-]
Patent Pending, In europe?
TIL Software Patents are still totally a thing in Europe via a back door.
ViktorRay 37 minutes ago [-]
This is insanely cool. Incredible.
Zebfross 10 hours ago [-]
Mine gets stuck at loading 90%.
Orbify_Karsten 10 hours ago [-]
The traffic right now is insane, 200 people trying the demo at the same time :\
jasonjmcghee 9 hours ago [-]
Isn't it just static files? Use a cdn like cloudflare or AWS CloudFront or depending on size - if you can break it into chunks of like 50mb each, GitHub pages (free)
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.
cronin101 10 hours ago [-]
is 200 a lot of concurrent people? What is required from the server in order to render the demo, can't most of the work be pushed to the edge devices?
Orbify_Karsten 9 hours ago [-]
yeah I probably shouldnt have included a 100mb gaussian splat file to load each time.. I had no idea so many people would try it :)
edf13 9 hours ago [-]
Any video demo available - love to see it in action
Dansvidania 9 hours ago [-]
Absolutely honest question: what is the advantage of this over a top view navigation with the orientation following the orientation of movement? Am I missing something?
samtheprogram 9 hours ago [-]
If you've ever been confused about which turn is which with top down navigation, then this is for you. While driving a car, being able to at a glance know exactly what turn is what would have saved me countless wrong turns, my parents probably doubly so.
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.
Dansvidania 8 hours ago [-]
while I think that the widgets telling you which lane to put yourself in largely solve this kind of intersection confusion, I understand the problem you are describing
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) ?
CamperBob2 6 hours ago [-]
For me, confusion in top-down navigation happens either because there's no bitmapped imagery being displayed, forcing me to guess where the turn is by mentally wrapping vague 2D geometry over the scene viewed through my windshield, or because the trace isn't drawn precisely enough over the imagery that is available.
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."
engineer_22 9 hours ago [-]
You can calibrate navigation to visual landmarks, i.e. you can see the turn coming up and match it to what you see out your window. But you also still get an overhead "what lies ahead" map for planning your route further out. This is an interesting concept, maybe a hybrid approach would be useful, a simple overhead streets map as default that swaps to the 3rd person view when you approach your turn.
jonash54 7 hours ago [-]
A problem of open GeoData is very much their coverage and availability in the EU. While the countries and their survey offices are required to release high value datasets in standardized form, some simply don’t. In Germany we have 16 states and every one of them has their own standard and pipelines for generating that data, and everyone releases it differently. Take LiDAR: Bavaria should be distributing it through OpenData portals and is required to by the EU, but they simply ignore that and charge 8000€ for it. Building international or even EU wide geo-projects from OpenData like https://hillsha.de is difficult because of that, you never get full coverage.
But as a tool for mapbuilders for small areas or planned tours i think this could be great
efficax 7 hours ago [-]
I've been playing video games for decades and this made me sick to my stomach almost immediately, but neat otherwise
Coeur 9 hours ago [-]
Beautiful perspective if you need to take a left in 500 meters. Not so great if you have to take a left in 3 kilometers because that would just not be visible.
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...
micromacrofoot 9 hours ago [-]
The trick would be adapting relatively, which a lot of apps already do... zoom/flatten out if it's a long stretch of nothing, back in when you start approaching more complicated sections.
angiolillo 10 hours ago [-]
Neat!
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.
Orbify_Karsten 10 hours ago [-]
thanks. Im still tweaking the map and camera settings, its far from perfect yet. Maybe next demo update I'll include some of the sliders to play around with
andy99 7 hours ago [-]
Very cool, after watching a minute it grew on me and I can see why the perspective is useful.
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.
dengsauve 6 hours ago [-]
The top down view of upcoming traffic complications ahead of a forward angled view of your surroundings seems incredibly practical to me.
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.
grep_name 6 hours ago [-]
I almost immediately click-dragged into a nearby building by accident, and am fascinated by how this engine attempts to extrapolate the inside of the building using only information about the outside. It's kind of surreal, and slightly more convincing than it feels like it should be at times
hexator 9 hours ago [-]
A variant of this but taking place on an O'Neill Cylinder would be amazing. I've always been captivated by the idea of the horizon curving up in front of you.
maqp 9 hours ago [-]
looks cool.
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.
aidenn0 9 hours ago [-]
Also any points shown (e.g. destination, POIs) that are more than a few degrees away from straight ahead appear to be next to you, but following you which is quite confusing.
recursive 7 hours ago [-]
In the demo, the "Destination" and "Point of Interest" seem to be floating around randomly. I'd expect them to point out the things they're labeling, but their movement seems to bear little correlation to anything.
phyzome 2 hours ago [-]
Sounds cool, but it's too heavy for my laptop.
SubiculumCode 7 hours ago [-]
let's give drivers motion sickness isnt a good strategy, just my opinion.
overtone1000 4 hours ago [-]
I also experienced vertigo, but I'm particularly prone to vertigo induced by 3D scenes. Still, I think this is the first time a screen as small as my phone did it.
Keeo 3 hours ago [-]
Huh, patent pending? I am somewhat sure there is a mod for minecraft.
prometheus1992 9 hours ago [-]
Nice work! This sort of reminds me of a game I saw demo'd on HN about a year ago, where you could walk and talk to the people and do some tasks- the difference being - in that game the world felt like a convex sphere and here it is concave.
SkepticalWhale 9 hours ago [-]
Very cool. This would actually save me from those terrible times when the navigation tells me to turn, but not which lane is best for the next turn after that. Now I could visualize it clearly.
That being said, it is a little dizzying to watch.
NDlurker 9 hours ago [-]
At first I thought this was a cool gimmick, but this seems like it would be really helpful. You get to see the angle of the curve from the driver's perspective and the overhead view at the same time!
Hypergraphe 9 hours ago [-]
I think it could be useful in really dense exchange hubs when you don't clearly see which lane you have to take.
arjie 8 hours ago [-]
That was surprisingly nice. I get to see the far distance on the map. Something has to be done about turns, though. They’re far too whirly for me. Good demo!
jubilanti 8 hours ago [-]
Is this supposed to be usable at all on Firefox Android?
pohuing 7 hours ago [-]
I'm getting a solid frame per second in FF android. It's quite nostalgic to have a navigation system this laggy.
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.
Conscat 10 hours ago [-]
I don't remember a map from the movie so I didn't know what to expect. Instantly I love this. I actually wish I could have this rather than street view in Google Maps.
Very cool but wow that just triggered motion sickness I didn't even know I had
Fraterkes 7 hours ago [-]
Folded cities being primarily associated with Inception instead of ringworlds really shows you pr is everything.
Krasnol 2 hours ago [-]
It shows PR is mind rape.
ourcat 8 hours ago [-]
Nice. I'm loving seeing the increase in usage of Gaussian Splats these days.
And it's getting so much easier to create them too.
creativeSlumber 6 hours ago [-]
this looks pretty cool.
since it curves the the 3d map, what would it look like when you are driving through downtown highrises? would the tops of the buildings clash into each other?
what about steep uphill/downhill sections ?
10 hours ago [-]
bluerooibos 51 minutes ago [-]
Good luck with that patent.
maestroquirk 8 hours ago [-]
Would love this for walking around nyc
nnevatie 7 hours ago [-]
Looks ok but easy to get lost literally into the weeds of the vegetation.
6 hours ago [-]
plumbees 6 hours ago [-]
This is great but also i want to vomit
camgitt 6 hours ago [-]
gave me motion sickness in the turns, but i guess i should be looking at the real road
d3rockk 8 hours ago [-]
This would be an insane video game map.
libria 7 hours ago [-]
This would be a fire FPS especially if the bullets traveled along the curve.
d3rockk 5 hours ago [-]
Even crazier idea would be the possibility of 'normal bullets' that travel along the curve, and 'special bullets' that travel on a direct diagonal via warped space & time.
dogscatstrees 7 hours ago [-]
Spent 20 seconds on it.
idiotsecant 8 hours ago [-]
This is pretty intuitive and useful, I think. I would suggest swapping to an angle equal to half the angle of the turn once your approach is within a certain distance, to show the user what is coming up around that turn. Frequently you need to turn then turn, so seeing 'ahead' a bit would be cool
Zero chance you can patent this though.
mpalmer 9 hours ago [-]
Very cool idea. I was on board until the first turn, then I just felt seasick.
B1FF_PSUVM 9 hours ago [-]
Does it come with barf bags, or at least a discount coupon?
iJohnDoe 7 hours ago [-]
Bad ass. Nicely done.
lofaszvanitt 8 hours ago [-]
Finally something new and shiny. Looks promising.
dreamcompiler 8 hours ago [-]
Cute. Only runs at about 1fps on my 5yo LG phone but it's a miracle it runs at all.
julienreszka 8 hours ago [-]
What problem does it solve tho ?
ThouYS 11 hours ago [-]
ok this is nice
nicwolff 9 hours ago [-]
What the hell is "right drag"?
tom_ 8 hours ago [-]
Hold down secondary mouse button, typically the right one, and move the mouse. (If you don't have a mouse attached, you might not be able to perform this action.)
Orbify_Karsten 8 hours ago [-]
It means click and hold the right mouse button, then move the mouse. Fair question, the label is pretty cryptic
kwarcode 5 hours ago [-]
J. Edgar Hoover
j45 7 hours ago [-]
This would look great on an iPad mini running as the vehicle display.
And likely in most EVs.
It's completely wild that they're trying to patent a visualization that already existed in multiple movies.
rjh29 52 minutes ago [-]
Why does it have to be an iPad mini? It's not even oled and there are hundreds of other small tablets available for less money.
archonis 6 hours ago [-]
...and they're promoting it by referencing said movies.
j45 5 hours ago [-]
Adding two existing features together (gps mapping on an inverted sphere) doesn't seem to be the basis of a patent to the rules of incremental innovation.
tehnoslow 3 hours ago [-]
Cool idea, but it feels more suited for pedestrians or cyclists moving at a slower pace. Not sure this format would work well in a car, since you can't really see the whole road ahead.
At 100 km/h, you need to grasp the route and upcoming turns quickly and this view might not give you enough time to get in the right lane.
Still, props to them for trying something new.
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...
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.
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.
I use map view / north is up, which makes it reasonably easy to get he big picture - I encourage everybody to try it :).
Let us embrace this minor imperfection by simply excluding U-turns from this presentation method.
https://x.com/rikarends/status/2093273761797554552
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.
Im clicking "Apply to YC" right now
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
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.
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.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fkk9DI-8el4
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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) ?
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 as a tool for mapbuilders for small areas or planned tours i think this could be great
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
Zero chance you can patent this though.
And likely in most EVs.
It's completely wild that they're trying to patent a visualization that already existed in multiple movies.