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...

I see a whole new business category being born: Nausea as a Service!

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.

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.

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 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.

Agreed. I have no problem with a tilt a whirl but this triggers something.

thanks. Yes, youre not the first one saying that. Next demo update will have more options

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

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.

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.

Is this supposed to be usable at all on Firefox Android?

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.

This would be an insane video game map.

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

Thanks for sharing! Building this in public, check my X for more updates! https://x.com/karshuit

Would love this for walking around nyc

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Does it come with barf bags, or at least a discount coupon?

Very cool idea. I was on board until the first turn, then I just felt seasick.

What the hell is "right drag"?

ok this is nice