Orbify.eu pitches warped Inception-style 3D maps for navigation
Orbify.eu, a two-year-old Norwegian startup, wants people to see the world in a new way – through a warped lens that bends rendered map scenes into the dream sequence perspective seen in Christopher Nolan's movie Inception.
The geospatial biz, co-founded by Karsten Huitfeldt, is developing image processing software that folds a 3D map model onto a curved surface.
The technique, showcased in Inception, combines a near-field street-level perspective that ramps into an overhead view at distance.
Orbify says it has a patent pending for the technology in the EU (PCT/EP2026/058725).
The patent application hasn't been published, so it's unclear what the company claims should be protected and whether past implementations would be deemed prior art by patent examiners.
Huitfeldt worked as an architect and project manager at Snøhetta until 2025.
He co-founded Orbify to explore ways to improve navigational interfaces.
The startup, not to be confused with another Oslo-based company with the same name, Orbify.ai, has some initial funding from Innovation Norway and Norges forskningsråd.
"We're somewhere between a working prototype and a commercial product, and we're pursuing two things in parallel," Huitfeldt told The Register in an email.
"One: standard practice for us has been to get IP filing in place early, so we've filed a patent as an 'Image Processing System,' currently in its second examination round with the EU patent office; the application covers the specific bending algorithm, shader and camera setup that produce the effect, and its use in a moving navigation context with overlaid route information," he said.
In terms of validation, Huitfeldt said the core technology is working and publicly demonstrable.
At the moment, Orbify is testing whether the interface actually improves navigation.
Orbify last week released an interactive demo of its curved map UI that runs in a web browser using the PlayCanvas Engine, an open source JavaScript engine that takes advantage of WebGL2 and WebGPU.
It presents Gaussian splatting in a spatial interface.
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