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02-20-2020, 06:20 AM
(This post was last modified: 02-20-2020, 04:20 PM by emalafeew.)
City Mode is finally out!!!!
We hope it makes possible the 50% of rides in cities you've wanted that our "Country Mode" couldn't handle. Visit places you've lived or want to go on vacation.
Its button says "experimental" because this is a completely new way of rendering rides, and though we've tested a number of locations we need you to tell us anywhere that it behaves unexpectedly!
Note the choice of mode is up to you, it's not set or enforced by the ride. Though in the future we may allow rides to be tagged as country or city and prompt you to change. We'd like to do that before making "suggested rides" through cities, since country mode is still the default.
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Tried city mode this morning on a ride in my hometown. Seems like it has potential. Worked better in a downtown area than a residential neighborhood.
On a 4 lane road the virtual road is only 2 lanes wide which makes for some weird artifacts on the "non virtual" side but it's not a deal breaker.
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I had some weird experiences with City Mode.... The view appear to project houses onto blank invisible buildings that were not the right size and shape for the projection. Then...things really started going crazy. Routes started shooting up in the air, climbing like an airplane. Then...my bike started falling....falling...falling into a deep blue bottomless pit. Even switching back to "comfort mode" caused my third person avatar...to start doing wheelies... glitching like he was trying to get back up in the sky. It also caused some of the white dots to grow to the size of basketballs. I also had two rows of white dots...not the usual right and left, but up and down...one row at street level and the other row at eye level.
After a couple of hours of riding, I tried it again in another more densely populated city area. It seemed to perform much better.
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Tiles are 1km large and we keep them loaded around you, so it would be a bug if you ever went off a tile. You can go off the painted roads as much as you want, sometimes the Google directions don't even follow them! I'll check out your telemetry to see if I can repro
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Tried City mode a couple times and have two questions/suggestions. I would almost rather see the vehicles in the streets vs having them paved over like currently happening. Also, why are the buildings/sky so much lighter than the objects close to the street? This is really very disorienting and confusing. Any way to get the top half of the images to match the bottom half closest to the street? City mode seems to have potential, but is still really buggy now. Please keep tweeting it and thanks for listening to all our comments and suggestions.
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02-25-2020, 10:28 PM
(This post was last modified: 02-25-2020, 10:32 PM by emalafeew.)
Hey Spyder,
At the beginning of this effort we tried to identify everything that meant "distortion" to people, and what we could do to combat it while preserving continuous motion (which Comfort Mode does away with).
The distortion of cars in the road was a common complaint that no solution could help except for covering them up with roads. Also, showing all roads not just the one you're on make it better to look around intersections you pass through. And roads highlight a key capability of City Mode, because they can "go behind" its 3D buildings, which is not possible with Country Mode's depth maps.
Lightening the sky was done for two reasons. One was to highlight and focus your eye on those 3D building edges, which don't distort while moving between images like Country Mode's depth maps. The other is that the sky does not move continuously like the ground and 3D buildings, which can confuse the brain. Lightening it provides a subconscious clue which helped our brains (at least) process it differently, and worked better than other ways we tried to call out the building geometry.
The result isn't perfect by any means and has its own quirks, but we think is a valid and different way to tackle rides that are problematic in Country Mode. It represents something we could actually do on mobile VR with the data available to us (unlike say Google Earth). We're excited for the new gameplay and information capabilities it offers too--because its roads and buildings are stationary in 3D we can draw virtual objects around and beyond them from greater distances than we could with Country Mode.
We've been working on it for so long it was time to release and get everyone's take. We can tweak decisions like these if everyone understands the benefits/losses. Another thing we're looking at is whether different GIS datasets could give us better fitting roads or elevations.
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The main issue with the light skies is that a lot of buildings still fall into that area and it is really distracting to see part of a building bright and part washed out. Just my thoughts. Keep experimenting.
