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Posted by smoser 17 hours ago

Inception-style curved map for turn-by-turn directions(www.orbify.eu)
453 points | 149 commentspage 2
anigbrowl 11 hours ago|
The concept is good, the implementation not so much, at least not on desktop. Mouselook doesn't make sense here; A and D should turn, not sidestep, which you can't do in a car. You do show a car right at the outset so people are going to imprint on that. Lack of arrow key support also alienates non-gamers.
krm01 11 hours ago||
This is surprisingly useful. As I was imagining myself behind thr wheel I felt it was more clear as to when/where the next turn is. Probably because it combines top down flat with 3d spatial vs just one or the other. This was really good. I want it.
namuol 4 hours ago||
Neat!

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.

Kim_Bruning 14 hours ago||
Patent Pending, In europe?

TIL Software Patents are still totally a thing in Europe via a back door.

Waterluvian 4 hours ago||
I 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.
lacoolj 12 hours ago||
Patent Pending?

Any patent attorneys here know what exactly about this is "patent-able"?

repeekad 11 hours ago||
My understanding of the legal field is it's less about the actual law and more about how much you're willing to spend.
ssl-3 10 hours ago||
Maybe nothing here is patentable. We don't know yet.

All we know is that they've applied for a patent. If the patent they seek is granted, then it will be published and there will be no mystery about what it covers. :)

butternutsquash 4 hours ago||
As 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).
Zebfross 15 hours ago||
Mine gets stuck at loading 90%.
Orbify_Karsten 15 hours ago|
The traffic right now is insane, 200 people trying the demo at the same time :\
jasonjmcghee 15 hours ago|||
Isn't it just static files? Use a cdn like cloudflare or AWS CloudFront or depending on size - if you can break it into chunks of like 50mb each, GitHub pages (free)

200 people or 100k people wouldn't matter then, it'll be cached.

It will also make the download based almost entirely on client download speed.

cronin101 15 hours ago|||
is 200 a lot of concurrent people? What is required from the server in order to render the demo, can't most of the work be pushed to the edge devices?
Orbify_Karsten 15 hours ago||
yeah I probably shouldnt have included a 100mb gaussian splat file to load each time.. I had no idea so many people would try it :)
edf13 15 hours ago||
Any video demo available - love to see it in action
Dansvidania 14 hours ago||
Absolutely honest question: what is the advantage of this over a top view navigation with the orientation following the orientation of movement? Am I missing something?
samtheprogram 14 hours ago||
If you've ever been confused about which turn is which with top down navigation, then this is for you. While driving a car, being able to at a glance know exactly what turn is what would have saved me countless wrong turns, my parents probably doubly so.

One classic: there's a fork in the road on the way to my parents. One side is "straight", the other side is an exit. I took the wrong, exit side of that several times while my app said to go straight before I just knew the route and didn't need GPS at all. Top-down isn't as good in these cases because of densely packed roads and back to back exits.

That said, it's "good enough" and I doubt this takes off.

Dansvidania 13 hours ago|||
while I think that the widgets telling you which lane to put yourself in largely solve this kind of intersection confusion, I understand the problem you are describing

but this seems to me just a topdown and "third person" at the same time through the distortion, I don't see how it helps with knowing exactly where to turn, is it because it shows the way further down the turn (like, sideways after the turn in the demo) ?

CamperBob2 12 hours ago|||
For me, confusion in top-down navigation happens either because there's no bitmapped imagery being displayed, forcing me to guess where the turn is by mentally wrapping vague 2D geometry over the scene viewed through my windshield, or because the trace isn't drawn precisely enough over the imagery that is available.

I don't see much added value with this particular nausea-inducing approach. It falls into the category of "You should've thought less about whether you could and more about whether you should."

engineer_22 14 hours ago||
You can calibrate navigation to visual landmarks, i.e. you can see the turn coming up and match it to what you see out your window. But you also still get an overhead "what lies ahead" map for planning your route further out. This is an interesting concept, maybe a hybrid approach would be useful, a simple overhead streets map as default that swaps to the 3rd person view when you approach your turn.
dom96 8 hours ago|
Gets stuck loading at 90% for me
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