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.
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.