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Comment by shrx | Hacker News Reader

This is also a problem with Google Maps navigation. It is always showing the perspective looking straight ahead of your current direction, even when you're approaching a sharp turn. Instead, the perspective should be along a vector connecting your current location with the point where the navigation's path crosses the edge of the display, pointing straight up.

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So why not use 2D maps, have people lost the ability to read North up maps? I swear ever since paper maps have not been used in cars, people have gotten spatially dumber.

I love north-up maps because I find they give me way better spatial context. My truck’s nav system gives north-up as an option but my phone and my truck map both suffer from the same problem on different axes. My phone sits in its holder vertically, so I have way more north-south context than east-west. The truck screen is landscape, same problem north-south! A square map north-up would be amazing!

Obviously the answer is to get a square phone. One of those foldables?

2D map would work the same way with my proposal. The "north is up" part is the issue for me, I'd like to have the rotation oriented in such a way that (the visible part of the path to) my destination is up.

That seems very wrong and unintuitive for U-turns.

It does.

Let us embrace this minor imperfection by simply excluding U-turns from this presentation method.

Of course it could still have some maximum allowed rotation threshold.

Having any kind of threshold now makes your idea too complicated to implement, and more importantly, too complicated for mere mortals to understand.

I realize I've been spoiled by finally having the ability to tailor almost anything to my exact personal preference. Related: https://vibingwithai.substack.com/p/software-for-one-how-vib... and the HN discussion, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49096605

Took me a while to figure out what you're saying, now I assume you're using the "up is direction of motion"?

I use map view / north is up, which makes it reasonably easy to get he big picture - I encourage everybody to try it :).

>"up is direction of motion"

Yes, this is how it's currently implemented. My proposal is "up is the intersection of the path with the edge of the screen". Here's a mock comparison of the current behavior with my proposal: https://i.imgur.com/AmUnzfS.jpeg (The mocked perspective is wrong because I just cut out and rotated the image, but hopefully you get the idea)

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