Better driving instruction, earlier indication of change of direction with GPS

[Trip]

I find the direction for turns or exit from highway is given just before the actual turn or exit. Many times, turns and exits are missed and I have to back track. A longer lead time is better to warn of change in direction, especially it has no Voice direction.

Also, there is no mention of highway exit name or number. It only mention “Slight left or Slight right” for exiting a highway. It is better to use “Exit at ABC street or 123 exit number”. As least, I know to watch out for exit and not just keep right or left. Many times I miss the exit.

[BuckyE]

One small point about this may be your device’s GPS updating time lag. I’ve noticed that the Pocket Earth Location Blue Ball my iPad 2 is always a second or so behind the actual location of the car. Worse of course at higher speeds!

I have no idea if this is the iPad, PE, or both. But I assume even in the best of all possible worlds, given time between satelitte signal broadcast and reception, software processing, screen draw, etc. there has to be a bit of a lag. (Until, of course, technological and scientific advances make all of this stuff is happen faster than the speed of light. At which point Pocket Earth will be predicting our locations at some user-definable time in the future, right? ;^) ) I’ve noticed that the lag is something I have to anticipate when I use PE in the car to look at the map and give Loie directions.

Perhaps we need the ability to define the amount of lead time we get? To set it longer the faster we travel?

[GeoMagik]

@Trip:  Normally in Navigation/Play mode, PocketEarth should be giving you maximal lead time on the turns/instructions. As soon as you pass an instruction point, then instruction should change immediately to show you the following one, even if it is quite far away.  Of course, it is possible there is bug causing otherwise, but we have never seen that.  Can you tell us if you are always seeing this behavior or just sometimes. Can you tell us anything else about the specific cases its doing this, for example if the route crosses over itself, etc?

We are not happy about the lack of exit numbers, etc either, but currently we rely on a 3rd party online routing service and don’t have control over this. We are investigating possible solutions.

[GeoMagik]

@BuckyE:  The GPS normally gets location updates once per second. To avoid having the map jump abruptly on update, it instead does a 1 second animation to the new location so that it is smooth.  This does mean that at any given time the location shown on the map will be 1 second behind. This should generally be acceptable though, and is what all map apps that we have seen do.

[BuckyE]

Oh, the tiny bit of lag is certainly acceptable, yes, thanks. When a car is moving, the navigator just has to give the driver a little bit of advance notice. That’s all!

[Kahlbutz]

I can confirm the behavior with very (too) late driving instructions. Could it be possible that close to a complex intersections several instruction points follow each other in rapid succession? Then PE may issue the instruction immediately after the upstream instruction point … Which happens to be only a few meters upstream. One solution then would be to look ahead more than one instruction point to the next one with a non-trivial change of direction.

Cheers,
Klaus

[GeoMagik]

@Kahlbutz

You may be right that this is what is happening. If for some reason there are more than 1 instruction in a short distance from one another, the latter one (which may be more important) might be skipped.   We will investigate such possibility and correct if possible.

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