11 ms·
Inception-style curved map for turn-by-turn directions
- hexator 21d agoA 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.
- ThouYS 21d agook this is nice
- Orbify_Karsten 21d agoThanks for sharing! Building this in public, check my X for more updates! https://x.com/karshuit https://x.com/karshuit
- vessenes 21d agoThis 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.
- justusthane 21d agoSame. 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 21d agothanks. Yes, youre not the first one saying that. Next demo update will have more options
- niek_pas 21d agoI'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.
- goosejuice 21d agoAgreed. I have no problem with a tilt a whirl but this triggers something.
- Conscat 21d agoI 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.
- IdiotSavage 21d agohttps://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjAxMzY3NjcxNF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNTI5OTM0Mw@@._V1_.jpg https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjAxMzY3NjcxNF5BMl5B...
- deleted 21d ago[deleted]
- angiolillo 21d agoNeat! 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 21d agothanks. 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
- Zebfross 21d agoMine gets stuck at loading 90%.
- Orbify_Karsten 21d agoThe traffic right now is insane, 200 people trying the demo at the same time :\
- cronin101 21d agois 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 21d agoyeah 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 21d agoAny video demo available - love to see it in action
- jasonjmcghee 21d agoIsn'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.
- SkepticalWhale 21d agoVery 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.
- maqp 21d agolooks 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 21d agoAlso 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.
- NDlurker 21d agoAt 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 21d agoI think it could be useful in really dense exchange hubs when you don't clearly see which lane you have to take.
- tomgp 21d agoFirst 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/ https://berglondon.com/blog/2009/05/04/here-there-influences...
- hex4def6 21d agoThat seems like enough prior art to invalidate much of what could conceivably be considered novel in the pending patent...
- jimmydddd 21d agoThe 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.
- mxfh 21d agoI once saw a patent on that already earlier somewhere, which i assumed was the reason none of the automotive navigation UI's where doing this. Just checked again, and it's verbatim this use case and even active until 2030 still: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20100305853A1/en 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/papers/wood97.pdf https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall00/cs597b/p...
- prometheus1992 21d agoNice 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.
- sd9 21d agoThis 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 21d agoThis 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 21d agoI 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.
- mixdup 20d agoIt's also pretty good about stacking up a second turn in the corner banner that shows your next maneuver
- tikotus 21d agoApple Maps got really good at some point! I once pick it by accident for navigation, and never went back to Google Maps.
- ChrisMarshallNY 21d agoI 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.
- Dansvidania 21d agoAbsolutely 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?
- engineer_22 21d agoYou 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.
- samtheprogram 21d agoIf 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 21d agowhile 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 21d agoFor 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."
- B1FF_PSUVM 21d agoDoes it come with barf bags, or at least a discount coupon?
- tantalor 21d agoI see a whole new business category being born: Nausea as a Service!
- rootusrootus 21d agoYeah 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 21d agoYea, 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.
- krashidov 21d agoIt's already been done - VR
- Foreskin_Mafia 21d ago[dead]
- SrslyJosh 21d agoYes, I'm not normally prone to motion sickness, but the change of perspective during a turn is quite unpleasant.
- huflungdung 21d ago[dead]
- Coeur 21d agoBeautiful 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_Garmin_NAVIGON_iOS_c_Garmin_Deutschland_7_bc8bfe90d5.png https://www.notebookcheck.com/fileadmin/_processed_/csm_Garm...
- micromacrofoot 21d agoThe 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.
- nicwolff 21d agoWhat the hell is "right drag"?
- tom_ 21d agoHold 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 21d agoIt means click and hold the right mouse button, then move the mouse. Fair question, the label is pretty cryptic
- kwarcode 21d agoJ. Edgar Hoover
- HighGodLoki 21d agoThat'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 21d agoI 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
- mpalmer 21d agoVery cool idea. I was on board until the first turn, then I just felt seasick.
- maestroquirk 21d agoWould love this for walking around nyc
- orbital-decay 21d agoThis 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.
- dwd 21d agoIt 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 21d agoI found it useful because it shows context for the next turn and information about the street network near the next turn
- jonash54 21d agoI agree and for me that weirdly felt more natural
- naravara 21d agoI 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!”
- jimmySixDOF 21d agoyou might find it better in openstreetmap https://x.com/rikarends/status/2093273761797554552 https://x.com/rikarends/status/2093273761797554552
- jubilanti 21d agoIs this supposed to be usable at all on Firefox Android?
- pohuing 21d agoI'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.
- d3rockk 21d agoThis would be an insane video game map.
- julienreszka 21d agoWhat problem does it solve tho ?
- idiotsecant 21d agoThis 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.
- Kim_Bruning 21d agoPatent Pending, In europe? TIL Software Patents are still totally a thing in Europe via a back door.
- p_l 20d agoDepends on a country, not many try to get the backdoor through international trade (effort), and even then local law might make it problematic
- dreamcompiler 21d agoCute. Only runs at about 1fps on my 5yo LG phone but it's a miracle it runs at all.
- ourcat 21d agoNice. I'm loving seeing the increase in usage of Gaussian Splats these days. And it's getting so much easier to create them too.
- lofaszvanitt 21d agoFinally something new and shiny. Looks promising.
- arjie 21d agoThat 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!
- kogus 21d agoI 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fkk9DI-8el4
- dmd 21d ago> 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.
- Fraterkes 21d agoFolded cities being primarily associated with Inception instead of ringworlds really shows you pr is everything.
- Krasnol 21d agoIt shows PR is mind rape.
- MagicMoonlight 21d ago[dead]
- efficax 21d agoI've been playing video games for decades and this made me sick to my stomach almost immediately, but neat otherwise
- iJohnDoe 21d agoBad ass. Nicely done.
- recursive 21d agoIn 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.
- andy99 21d agoVery 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.
- j45 21d agoThis 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.
- archonis 21d ago...and they're promoting it by referencing said movies.
- j45 21d agoAdding 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.
- rjh29 21d agoWhy 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.
- leblancfg 21d agoGreat 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 21d agoThis 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.
- leblancfg 21d agoI need to know what lane I'll need to be in next so I can plan in advance.
- dhosek 21d agoYeah, there’s a tendency not to know with sufficient time, especially with heavy traffic.
- philistine 21d agoNot 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!
- leblancfg 21d agoThat'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.
- ssl-3 21d agoWhere 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.
- dogscatstrees 21d agoSpent 20 seconds on it.
- SubiculumCode 21d agolet's give drivers motion sickness isnt a good strategy, just my opinion.
- overtone1000 21d agoI 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.
- nnevatie 21d agoLooks ok but easy to get lost literally into the weeds of the vegetation.
- jonash54 21d agoA 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 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
- lacoolj 21d agoPatent Pending? Any patent attorneys here know what exactly about this is "patent-able"?
- repeekad 21d agoMy understanding of the legal field is it's less about the actual law and more about how much you're willing to spend.
- ssl-3 21d agoMaybe 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. :)
- camgitt 21d agogave me motion sickness in the turns, but i guess i should be looking at the real road
- plumbees 21d agoThis is great but also i want to vomit
- creativeSlumber 21d agothis 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 ?
- thatmf 21d agoVery cool but wow that just triggered motion sickness I didn't even know I had
- deleted 21d ago[deleted]
- grep_name 21d agoI 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
- dengsauve 21d agoThe 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.
- anigbrowl 21d agoThe 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 21d agoThis 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.
- Keeo 21d agoHuh, patent pending? I am somewhat sure there is a mod for minecraft.
- tehnoslow 21d agoCool 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.
- phyzome 21d agoSounds cool, but it's too heavy for my laptop.
- speby 21d agoNeat. Kinda novel. But sort of impractical and doesn't solve a problem anyone actually has with current navigation UIs. I still like it anyway.
- dom96 21d agoGets stuck loading at 90% for me
- yndoendo 20d agoIt stalled at 90% and took time to reach 100% but ran slow and clunky on a Fairphone 4; Waterfox. It never got past 0% on FLX1S; Firefox.
- bluerooibos 21d agoGood luck with that patent.
- ViktorRay 21d agoThis is insanely cool. Incredible.
- ChipopLeMoral 21d agoThis made me feel sick in 5 seconds.
- gxs 21d agoDoes anyone else hate how Google Maps zooms in right before a turn? 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
- butternutsquash 20d agoAs a side effect, this is a neat way to visualize Gaussian splatting! As you go further away from the main navigation route, the quality of the rendering continuously degrades, until it eventually becomes sparse ellipsoids (i.e., you can see the individual splats).
- Waterluvian 20d agoI think this takes the record for top thing that I expected to be wildly unintuitive and turns it to be incredibly intuitive. I absolutely love this and want it for real. It gives me a road view and an aerial view and transitions smoothly. Needs polish and to somehow be accessible in seconds for everywhere but I would default settings this in my car if it was there.
- namuol 20d agoNeat! 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.
- iamleppert 20d agoNavigation needs to be low cognitive overhead to have mass appeal. There's a reason why people do not navigate with satellite or photo real maps. This is an interesting projection and visualization but doesn't have much practical value.
- nelox 20d agoThanks for the Vertigo Rollercoaster
- very_good_man 20d agoInsanely cool. Good job!
- pmkary 20d agoThis is pure Bret-Victorian magic. Really the greatest single notational/visualization I have seen in a long long time. Wow. I'm so in love.
- _ZeD_ 20d agoI already have it (minus the "realistic rendering") in my old car navigation...
- maxglute 20d agoCarsick simulator. Cool otherwise.
- lefra 20d agoI tried three times on my 5-year-old phone. First time got stuck at 90% loading. Second time the tab crashed at 90% loading. Third time Chrome itself crashed once loading finished.
- mlvljr 20d ago[dead]
- doodlebugging 20d agoUnusual. Nice concept. I ran the demo. How does it select the vehicle used in the demo? Is that something that I can change? Overall I ran it on my old workstation desktop under LibreWolf with no issues.
- iwontberude 20d ago[dead]
- tsylba 20d agoThat's nice however I'll be surprise you can patent a few transformation matrices for an effect present in the public Zeitgeist since more than a decade. The core of the technique being Gaussian Splatting I guess I wonder how you'll get the data, except maybe SFM-ing your way through a worldwide collaborative effort. I suppose Google could do something like that with their own data.
- bitwize 20d agoThis is really cool. I'm also reminded of a game on SGIs called Mekton. Mekton was originally a mecha-combat RPG designed by Mike Pondsmith, the creator of Cyberpunk (2040, etc.); it was made into a multiplayer video game using OpenGL that was set on a ring-shaped space colony. When you land, you can see the landscape curve upwards ahead of you, as you're on the inside of the ring.
- dented42 20d agoIt’s a cute idea but I found it to be exceedingly unpleasant.
- ben_w 20d agoInteresting. I had a similar idea around a decade ago. 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.
- sfn42 20d agoI don't really see how this could ever be better than what Google maps already does. It's neat and cool and stuff, it's just not useful. And you need a way beefier computer in your car to run it.
- ben_w 20d agoIt may well be worse. This is one reason I didn't judge doing experiments to find out to be a good use of my time before vibe coding became a thing. 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.
- interloxia 20d agoReminds me of Hyperbolica from Codeparade. And Mercator Extreme! https://mrgris.com/projects/merc-extreme/ https://mrgris.com/projects/merc-extreme/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1256230/Hyperbolica/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1256230/Hyperbolica/ Spherical Geometry Is Stranger Than Hyperbolic - Hyperbolica Devlog #2 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yY9GAyJtuJ0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yY9GAyJtuJ0
- omega3 20d agohttps://berglondon.com/blog/2009/05/08/if-gps-had-here-there/ https://berglondon.com/blog/2009/05/08/if-gps-had-here-there...
- arxari 20d agoThis should be brought up to block the patent ngl
- danpalmer 20d agoNice demo, but can we talk about how this is patented. Should it be? Should something like this actually get granted. 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.
- arxari 20d agoI thought the same thing, just opened it and went "patent pending... Really?" 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".
- DarmokTanagra 20d agoVisually interesting, completely falls apart once you hit tree cover.
- JKCalhoun 20d agoInception, Schminception. Itʼs so tantalizingly close to looking like youʼre in a giant, cylindrical space station habitat… Do that instead!
- thepuglor 20d agoI did a similar prototype years ago in Rhino where the user was always the bottom of a bowl. This demo, like the Berg map, is cylindrical. Every turn causes a drastic transformation of the entire landscape and this is really jarring. 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!
- etatoby 20d agoAs others have said, turns need to precede the actual moment the vehicle turns, otherwise it's a blind spot. I wouldn't use it as is. Also the 3D performance is 2fps on my device. Other than that it's a cool demo, but not worthy of a patent. It's a pretty basic 3D transform, I'm not sure what's there to patent.
- WalterBright 20d agoYes, I want that!
- teekert 20d agoMeh, it doesn't really look into corners ahead, it should perhaps be more warped on the sides. Smart idea though.
- Tepix 20d agoIf you like these types of photographs, check out the Flatland series by photographer Aydın Büyüktaş, I think they're fantastic: https://aydinbuyuktas.com/work https://aydinbuyuktas.com/work https://www.museum-of-art.net/rooms/walk/2419/7172 https://www.museum-of-art.net/rooms/walk/2419/7172