For me it was Halo: Combat Evolved

Was thinking the same thing- I still have those posters and was thinking of them when I saw this was patent pending.

Great memory, great reference!

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.

Exactly what I thought of, I bought these posters at the time and they are still in the cardboard tube.

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.

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.

That seems like enough prior art to invalidate much of what could conceivably be considered novel in the pending patent...

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.

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. :)

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 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

I think it could be useful in really dense exchange hubs when you don't clearly see which lane you have to take.

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.

My understanding of the legal field is it's less about the actual law and more about how much you're willing to spend.

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.

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

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.

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.

It shows PR is mind rape.

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.

The traffic right now is insane, 200 people trying the demo at the same time :\

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.

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.

you might find it better in openstreetmap

https://x.com/rikarends/status/2093273761797554552

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!”

Yes, I'm not normally prone to motion sickness, but the change of perspective during a turn is quite unpleasant.

Nausea as a service, while begging for investments...

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.

> 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.

I found it useful because it shows context for the next turn and information about the street network near the next turn

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.

It's already been done - VR

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.

This would be a fire FPS especially if the bullets traveled along the curve.

I 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

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...

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 :).

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.

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.

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.

That seems very wrong and unintuitive for U-turns.

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.

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.

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."

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) ?

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?

> 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

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.

I agree and for me that weirdly felt more natural

b-AR-f Bags - half surgical mask half airplane sick bag

Im clicking "Apply to YC" right now

It does.

Let us embrace this minor imperfection by simply excluding U-turns from this presentation method.

I have had an occasional problem where a large building ends up blocking my view, but in general it’s very good.

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!

Apple Maps got really good at some point! I once pick it by accident for navigation, and never went back to Google Maps.

It fails the task as often as not on large East Coast highways. Not nearly as bad on the West Coast.

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.

I need to know what lane I'll need to be in next so I can plan in advance.

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!

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 :)

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.

I uninstalled Google Maps when it started draining my iPhone battery at an absurd rate. Apple Maps it is.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, there’s a tendency not to know with sufficient time, especially with heavy traffic.

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.

Any video demo available - love to see it in action