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Post #229

What if GPS worked like Here & There?

May 8th, 2009 by Matt Webb · 16 Comments
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You get used to the Here & There projection really fast. Timo Arnall, friend of S&W, was talking to Jack:

I’ve been sitting here staring at the map, pretty much on and off since yesterday. It comes across as a totally natural projection! … it’s as if you have wired two separate bits of my brain together; the bit that does maps, and the bit that does perspective.

Here’s a comparison:

uptown-comparison

Thanks Chris Woebken for the photo!

It starts feeling weird that you can’t see over rooftops.

And while these prints we’ve shown so far are tied to two intersections (one looking from 3rd and 7th, and the other from 3rd and 35th), yes we are working on doing it on the fly, and yes we’re looking at generating projections from all kinds of places for one-off prints.

The natural question is, what would this look like driving round Manhattan? (If you forget about the traffic.) As Fast Company and Gizmodo said, Garmin should do it. They totally should. And so here it is.

The Here & There projection is on the left, and the equivalent normal view is on the right. Click through and watch the HD version. It’s cool.

There’s another video too, that shows how the streets distort to make the projection possible.

Here’s what I’d like for my future magic in-car navigation system:

  • the superpower to see through the city into the distance
  • real-time!
  • traffic volume overlaid on the distant city map, with my route
  • a way to peek around corners
  • seeing further the faster my car is going

Any more?

Before this:

After this:

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