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- Hacker News
- 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.by anigbrowl
- I 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.by lefra
- 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?by Dansvidania
- 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.by engineer_22
- 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.
by HighGodLoki - 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 landscapeby jonash54
- 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.
by kogus - > 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.
by dmd - 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.by leblancfg
- I find these comments fascinating. Do people just switch off and become completely incapable of using the road when using GPS? You can use navigation and your ability to use roads, read road signs etc at the same time!
- 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.by Carrok
- 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.by vessenes
- Agreed. I have no problem with a tilt a whirl but this triggers something.by goosejuice
- 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.by justusthane
- thanks. Yes, youre not the first one saying that. Next demo update will have more options
- 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.by niek_pas
- I see a whole new business category being born: Nausea as a Service!by tantalor
- 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.
by rootusrootus - It's already been done - VRby krashidov
- Yes, I'm not normally prone to motion sickness, but the change of perspective during a turn is quite unpleasant.by SrslyJosh
- 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.
- you might find it better in openstreetmapby jimmySixDOF
- 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.by dwd
- 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!”
by naravara - I found it useful because it shows context for the next turn and information about the street network near the next turnby cousinbryce
- 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.by albrewer
- 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.
by sd9 - I had similar thoughts, but this is a largely solved problem: even headlights in my Volvo turn as I turn the wheel, and it should be easy to change rendering direction to an "average" of road tangents for the next say 50m (would depend on the speed and would need experimenting to know the best value).by necovek