For centuries, people have relied on the same types of maps. Whether a map is interactive or hand-colored in a book, it offers latitude and longitude as the key indexes for getting from point A to point B.
But designer and software engineer Peter Liu thinks he’s come up with an entirely new way to think about mapping. What if our maps were arranged by time, instead of space?
It’s slightly different from other mapping services like Google Maps. In essence, if you’re using an app like Google Maps, you likely already know both point A and point B. The time map is designed for instances when you don’t know the point B yet–it helps you decide what point B makes the most sense for the situation you’re in.
Liu is a team member for the location platform Mapbox‘s research and development team, tasked with anticipating what kinds of products the company’s clients might want in the future. Mapbox, which supports the Weather Channel’s mobile app and recently built a store locator tool for Android, creates many of the tools other companies use to support their mapping services.
Liu’s time map is just a prototype–the search function, for instance, doesn’t work very well at the moment (if you search for lunch, it’ll only pull up options that have the word “lunch” in their name). Liu says the search is entirely based on Foursquare’s API; he focused on building the map itself. That means that whatever app or service the time map was integrated into, it would use the search function for that service. If it was part of Yelp, it would use Yelp’s search. It’s a plug-and-play approach that mimics Mapbox’s philosophy as well, he says, because the company builds tools that their clients can mix and match with other services and platforms.
Liu has been talking to Mapbox’s mobile team about turning it into an app, but for the time being, he’s focusing on the next logical step: adding streets to his map of concentric circles. He imagines a map where you’re in the middle, and all the streets around you radiate outward, represented not by the physical length of the road but the time it would take for you to traverse that road to your destination.