Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Eric T Bauer

Charles H Shoemaker

Richard W Lappenbusch

The invention includes a traffic information system having servers that makes traffic data, images and video clips available to client devices in a common format that is independent of the format used within any particular public highway monitoring system that supplies the raw media elements. The invention further includes a user interface for depiction on a graphical display surface. The user interface has a road map showing a plurality of road segments that a user can interactively select. In addition, the user interface has a road image area that changes as the user selects different road segments to show recent images of a currently selected road segment. The images are obtained from public highway monitoring systems. Both a broad view and a detail view are available. In the broad view, highways are broken into high level segments and corresponding data such as average speed or travel time is shown only for the high level segments. In the detail view, a segment is shown broken into smaller sub-segments, and the user can view data at the level of the sub-segments. In addition to displaying traffic data and images, the user interface allows a user to find a shortest-time route between designated locations.

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Palo Alto, CA, United States of America

Eric T Bauer