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.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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, 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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) ?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.)
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...
https://berglondon.com/blog/2009/05/04/here-there-influences...
That seems like enough prior art to invalidate much of what could conceivably be considered novel in the pending patent...
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.
Exactly what I thought of, I bought these posters at the time and they are still in the cardboard tube.
Great memory, great reference!
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.
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.
I found it useful because it shows context for the next turn and information about the street network near the next turn
I agree and for me that weirdly felt more natural
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!”
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.
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.
I need to know what lane I'll need to be in next so I can plan in advance.
Yeah, there’s a tendency not to know with sufficient time, especially with heavy traffic.
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
I see a whole new business category being born: Nausea as a Service!
It's already been done - VR
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
thanks. Yes, youre not the first one saying that. Next demo update will have more options
Agreed. I have no problem with a tilt a whirl but this triggers something.
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.
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
let's give drivers motion sickness isnt a good strategy, just my opinion.
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.
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
Patent Pending, In europe?
TIL Software Patents are still totally a thing in Europe via a back door.
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.
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.
Thanks for sharing! Building this in public, check my X for more updates! https://x.com/karshuit
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.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fkk9DI-8el4
Looks ok but easy to get lost literally into the weeds of the vegetation.
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...
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.
Mine gets stuck at loading 90%.
The traffic right now is insane, 200 people trying the demo at the same time :\
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.
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?
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 :)
Any video demo available - love to see it in action
I've been playing video games for decades and this made me sick to my stomach almost immediately, but neat otherwise
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.
Folded cities being primarily associated with Inception instead of ringworlds really shows you pr is everything.
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!
Spent 20 seconds on it.
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.
Is this supposed to be usable at all on Firefox Android?
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.
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.
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?
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) ?
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.
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!
I think it could be useful in really dense exchange hubs when you don't clearly see which lane you have to take.
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.
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.
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.
Would love this for walking around nyc
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.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjAxMzY3NjcxNF5BMl5B...
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.
This would be an insane video game map.
This would be a fire FPS especially if the bullets traveled along the curve.
Bad ass. Nicely done.
Does it come with barf bags, or at least a discount coupon?
Finally something new and shiny. Looks promising.
Cute. Only runs at about 1fps on my 5yo LG phone but it's a miracle it runs at all.
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.
What problem does it solve tho ?
Very cool idea. I was on board until the first turn, then I just felt seasick.
ok this is nice
What the hell is "right drag"?
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.)
It means click and hold the right mouse button, then move the mouse. Fair question, the label is pretty cryptic