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.
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.
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.
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.
I am curious of what this would look like using OSM. The vector map would seem to lend itself better to navigation versus using actual images like this.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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...
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.
Especially that it looks like to be an European patent and it is not clear what wouldn't be "software" in their patent.
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.
Playing devil's advocate: the projection alone won't be the patent and probably is not patentable on its own, the patent will be about applying such projections for real-time navigation which brings non-obvious difficulties that must be solved in a particular way (like the way the project is transformed during turns, how navigation is overlayed, and how motion sickness and distractions are counteracted) making the patent consist of the projection-styled navigation enabled by certain rules (what and how to present it) and the technical way the projections are transformed.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
2D map would work the same way with my proposal. The "north is up" part is the issue for me, I'd like to have the rotation oriented in such a way that (the visible part of the path to) my destination is up.
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)
I had similar thoughts, but this is a largely solved problem: even headlights in my Volvo turn as I turn the wheel, and it should be easy to change rendering direction to an "average" of road tangents for the next say 50m (would depend on the speed and would need experimenting to know the best value).
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?
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.
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.
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) ?
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."
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.
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.
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.
Basically if you drive on a highway, this would not give you any information what you have to do past the next 15 seconds, while giving you a lot of unnecessary stuff 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...
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.)
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
This looks pretty neat but also distracting and not very convenient. A useful followup 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, that would be a lot more useful.
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 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.
175 comments
[ 0.32 ms ] story [ 13.0 ms ] threadIt 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.
That being said, it is a little dizzying to watch.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I use map view / north is up, which makes it reasonably easy to get he big picture - I encourage everybody to try it :).
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)
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."
Even aside from that, the constant feeling of going downhill would be off-putting to me.
Im clicking "Apply to YC" right now
Basically if you drive on a highway, this would not give you any information what you have to do past the next 15 seconds, while giving you a lot of unnecessary stuff 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...
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.
https://x.com/rikarends/status/2093273761797554552
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.