7 ms·
I think this is great, but I can see it being potentially improved further if there was a temporary overlay of the physical map whenever you hover over a destin
by shurcooL 9y ago
I think this is great, but I can see it being potentially improved further if there was a temporary overlay of the physical map whenever you hover over a destination.
Basically, I feel that completely removing the physical map is okay until you've picked a target. Then, having to click on it to be able to see what the route looks like (which streets to take, etc.) is higher friction than I'd like. Instead, imagine if hovering would give you a route overlay, and as you hover your mouse over multiple places you're considering, you're already aware of the physical directions as well.
Having to click back and forth feels quite constraining.
This is simply feedback on a way I think it could be improved further, not to take away from how good it already is.
- sgustard 9y agoLocation cues like "near the lake" or "near the train station" or "near the homeless camp" are critical pieces of information for me before I pick a target.
- nevir 9y agoI wonder if some sort of projection would help there: expand areas around the points of interest, and compress space between points.
- geon 9y agoPerhaps morphing the physical map to match the time would work?
- davnicwil 9y agoHaven't fully thought it through, but I think such a projection would be unintelligible in most cases - it would probably only look remotely 'intuitive' if travel time would always increase with distance. For a real city, it would likely just be very weirdly morphed blobs of the map all cut up and smushed back together, with bizarrely curved roads, non-aligning roads & train lines, etc.
- ambicapter 9y agoNow I definitely want to see that map, just for kicks.
- csom 9y agoHere's such a map for Singapore we created quite a while ago: http://xiaoji-chen.com/2011/isochronic-singapore/ http://xiaoji-chen.com/2011/isochronic-singapore/ http://www.chsommer.com/isosin.htm http://www.chsommer.com/isosin.htm
- deepGem 9y agoThe more I think about this, the more I'm convinced it'll work. Somehow making the map truly dynamic by changing the scale according to the time it takes to reach the destination will be helpful. So the scale of the map changes as per the traffic and other factors that affect the time taken to reach specific destinations. This should work, yeah.
- flachsechs 9y agoi agree. hover a geo map and have an easy 'hide this' button to hit that will remove the entry and take you back to the timemap. choosing where to go for lunch will be a flash.
- jameslk 9y agoHovering? Like with a mouse?
- TeMPOraL 9y agoIt's still easy to forget that many people use applications on devices with only primitive input options available :).
- jameslk 9y agoYup, if I'm looking for directions I'm probably on my phone, not at a computer. I guess others didn't get the point/joke, hence the downvotes?
- TeMPOraL 9y agoI wrote my comment vaguely on purpose, but 19 hours later: yes, I meant touchscreen as primitive input mechanisms, compared to a mouse pointer.
- TylerE 9y agoBest, although I don't really know how you'd do it computationally, would be something like a London Subway map... schematically correct but only geographically accurate in a broad sense.
- SubiculumCode 9y agoHow about deform the physical map by a deformation field defined by ETA (i.e. stretch and compress)? e.g. https://www.slicer.org/wiki/Documentation/4.2/Modules/DeformationFieldVisualizer https://www.slicer.org/wiki/Documentation/4.2/Modules/Deform... What would be cool about this is that it is still a map of the map, but the unit becomes time adjusted mile.
- msutherl 9y agoAnd given a suitable vector representation of the street layout, the stretch-and-compress could be given constraints so as not to warp (i.e. curve streets on) the map
- SubiculumCode 9y agoMy thought exactly.
- darkmighty 9y agoPerhaps you can go even further and try to make it so that any two points have pairwise correct distances, like in the Azimuthal equidistant projection? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azimuthal_equidistant_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azimuthal_equidistant_projecti... Perhaps there are metric functions where this is not possible (a quick proof eludes me...[1]), but approximations might be possible anyway. [1] Edit: actually it's quite simple. Any non-isotropic metric cannot have an Euclidean equidistant projection, simply take a pair of points lying in rays (1,0) and (0,1) in an L^p metric, p not 2, as a counterexample.
- darkmighty 9y ago
- erikb 9y agoI think the idea is to keep mobile and desktop in sync here. And mobile doesn't have a "finger over" event I think.
- LambdaComplex 9y agoPress and hold?
- JimmyAustin 9y agoPeek/Pop works on iOS for 6S and above.
- collinmanderson 9y agoIt would be neat if they skewed the map to match travel times.
- stouset 9y agoI don’t think this is a transformation that can be performed by only stretching and deforming the surface (e.g., the maps of a city with time units vs distance units aren’t homomorphic). Imagine starting on the far south end of a congested city surrounded by a circular, relatively low-traffic highway. Points on the northern end of the city would be “closer” on such a map than points directly in the center. You could certainly define a transformation that accounts for this, but I think it would necessarily defy most people’s intuitive interpretation of such a map.
- geon 9y agoYou could resolve it by cutting the circular highway att the furthest point, and let the surrounded are baloon out. The map would still make sense close to the user.
- PascLeRasc 9y agoIt really shines in dense urban areas like the example in Oakland CA. The route overlay would be really important if there's anything like super busy roads or no sidewalks available.
- kesor 9y agoor just keep the "time circles", only make them not circles but rather a spline connecting all the 5-minute-away dots.
- whostolemyhat 9y agoMapumental[1] does something like this - it shows how far you can get with public transport from a postcode in a certain amount of time. [1] https://mapumental.com/ https://mapumental.com/)