Mobile Display Solutions

Rethinking Mobile Maps

Mobile navigation devices, including PNDs and phones, have limitations on the way that they can interact with a mobile user. Map tiling is widespread as an accepted delivery of online navigation information. In its current form map tiling has many limitations requiring image buffers which use valuable memory and that screen data be converted to BMP or 3D. This problem is further illustrated in Figure 1 below.

Typically current images are downloaded as PNG/GIF Tiles. An example of this is the method used by Google. The image tiles are stored in memory, completely decoded to image buffers and the resulting screen images are produced from the image buffers. Updates require that completely new image tiles be downloaded as PNG/GIF files.

Ilustrated in Figure 2, WindSpring’s data miniaturization technology (DMT™) provides a mechanism to deliver faster access, use fewer resources and require smaller communication than current PNG tiling methods. Images are downloaded as MDF encoded BMP/3D allowing screen data to be directly created and edited from MDF data. Partial updates are downloaded as MDF encoded BMP/3D.