I've had a similar concept rattling around in my head for a while. Rather than basing the time on travel distance from a point, you can base it on travel distance from a route. Then results can be ranked by "on my home commute, how far out of my way is this place?"
A new kind of map: it’s about time
171–180 of 207 posts
Re: A new kind of map: it’s about time
#172For food, I'd like a map that allows me to minimize the sum of time spent traveling and time spent waiting in line.
Re: A new kind of map: it’s about time
#173Really interesting that the "time distance" is more or less linear with walking/biking, but in a car it has a non linear relationship: For further places you take a highway, which requires some extra distance but adds a significant speed boost. Having the dots shift in position when changing modes of transportation was really insightful.
Re: A new kind of map: it’s about time
#174A bit off topic. What I really want in map software (specifically for finding my way): know that I know my way around certain areas. The beginning of my commute no matter where I go is full of turns every minute or two. It makes listening to audio books impossible because interrupted with "in 100 feet..." Constant. Just day "go to $MAJORPOINT" then start giving me step by step directions.
Why not just set navigation audio to alerts only (at least in Google maps)
I use Waze on my daily commute not because I don't know the way to work, but because I would like to be routed around traffic as well as possible.
Setting audio to alerts works when a traffic situation develops while I am driving and the optimal route changes on the fly (generating an alert). But, if there is a pre-existing situation when I start that's changing the route in a couple of places from the "normal" route I get 80%of the time, alerts will only notify me of it about it five seconds after I miss the unusual exit, when it starts finding a new route.
Of course the simple fix is to get a phone mount and just look at the route whenever you want - but then you're leaving the screen on constantly, or unlocking it at arm's reach while driving.
Re: A new kind of map: it’s about time
#175By removing literal geography, we now have a map that more closely reflects the way we think about our environment: a cluster of restaurants “five minutes that way” versus “ten minutes the other.” Speak for yourself! I feel way more confident getting around when I know the actual geography.
Imo when it comes to that there is a huge difference between men and women, or perhaps more accurately people who are highly skilled in map-reading vs people who aren't. In general men prefer to navigate using a map, cardinal directions and can adapt their routefinding on the fly (the actual geography); women prefer to navigate using turn-by-turn directions and fixed landmarks ("five minutes that way," "make the seco…
> Imo when it comes to that there is a huge difference between men and women, or perhaps more accurately people who are highly skilled in map-reading vs people who aren't.
If the second part is more accurate, why did you even bother mentioning the first? If it's correlation you don't even 100% believe in, leave it out.
Re: A new kind of map: it’s about time
#176By removing literal geography, we now have a map that more closely reflects the way we think about our environment: a cluster of restaurants “five minutes that way” versus “ten minutes the other.” Speak for yourself! I feel way more confident getting around when I know the actual geography.
Imo when it comes to that there is a huge difference between men and women, or perhaps more accurately people who are highly skilled in map-reading vs people who aren't. In general men prefer to navigate using a map, cardinal directions and can adapt their routefinding on the fly (the actual geography); women prefer to navigate using turn-by-turn directions and fixed landmarks ("five minutes that way," "make the seco…
Do you honestly think preferences for using maps are based on anything else besides someone's familiarity with maps and the situational context? Gender doesn't matter.
Re: A new kind of map: it’s about time
#177In .. 7 .. minutes you wi reach your deatination .. in shady alley behind the dumpster. But hey, it's close!
Cool idea though.
Re: A new kind of map: it’s about time
#178I haven't heard much about Mapbox before. Where do they get their data? Do they buy it from another company or actually do the mapping themselves?
Re: A new kind of map: it’s about time
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Best, 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.
How 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/Deform... What would be cool about this is that it is still a map of the map, but the unit becomes time adjusted mile.
Perhaps 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_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.
Re: A new kind of map: it’s about time
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Location 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.
I wonder if some sort of projection would help there: expand areas around the points of interest, and compress space between points.
Perhaps morphing the physical map to match the time would work?