Animation with Flexible Flow Control and Dynamic Granularity to Aid Map Navigation on Mobile Devices

Abstract

Among various mobile applications, map navigation has attracted major attention. However, due to the limited input and output capabilities of mobile devices, optimal usability in map-based applications is usually difficult to realize. This paper describes an animation mechanism to aid map navigation on mobile devices. This animation mechanism can be applied to close the mental gaps between consecutive but discrete views during map navigation to strengthen the navigation context. More significantly, through the partition of the animation generation and rendering process, the animation mechanism makes animation data-driven to enable flexible flow control and dynamic granularity adjustment. Support for fine-grained map navigation under minimal system I/O requirements can therefore be realized, with a good balance between the active system aids and necessary user interaction