Stanley Yao's Blog

Link: Animated 3D Driving Direction

Reading map isn't always an easy job for lots of people.  In Friends TV show, Joey put a paper map on the gound and step on it in order to get a sense which direction is right.  Though that's a little bit of a extreme case, it illustrates the challenge.  Many people need more intuitive online maps too and especially the driving directions, so that they don't have to put the computer monitor on the ground and step on it :)  Some GPS devices like TomTom came up with really nice 3D UI to show the driving directions in a much more intuitive way.

Live Virtual Earth Map provides a rich set of APIs with which interesting map applications could be developed, even in 3D and birds eye view.  As an example, I built an animated driving direction that kind of simulates TomTom.  Turn by turn the map will move as if you are driving and what you see is a view of 45 degree looking down from above your "car" and you can see clearly what road and intersection is ahead of you.

The basic idea is to call the routing API to get the itinerary with all segments of the driving direction.  For each segment, the map orientation will be adjusted so that the next point is right ahead and then pan to the next point while showing the textual turn by turn instruction. Some suggestion for the API is that the panning APIs are mostly asynchronized so that the calls return immediately while the actually panning is done a while later.  This causes a little bit trouble in showing the textual turn by turn driving direction in sync with the map animation.  Map events help to some degree, but still some work needs to be done to keep the map and text in sync, because events are generic and there doesn't seem to be a way to assign per event instance parameters.  Also the detailed road of each segment is not available, so when the road between 2 points is not straight we can't follow the curve of the road in order to simulate the exact driving experience.