Patent ID: 7375732

Claim:
A method, comprising: receiving at a client terminal a plurality of pre-rendered images of varying zoom levels of a roadmap; receiving one or more user navigation commands including zooming information at the client terminal; and blending two or more of the pre-rendered images to obtain an intermediate image of an intermediate zoom level that corresponds with the zooming information of the navigation commands such that a display of the intermediate image on the client terminal provides the appearance of smooth navigation, wherein at least some roads of the roadmap are scaled up and/or down in order to produce the plurality of pre-determined images, and the scaling is at least one of: (i) physically proportional to the zoom level; and (ii) non-physically proportional to the zoom level, and wherein the non-physically proportional scaling may be expressed by the following formula: p=d′·z a , where p is a linear size in pixels of one or more elements of the object at the zoom level, d′ is an imputed linear size of the one or more elements of the object in physical units, z is the zoom level in units of physical linear size/pixel, and a is a power law where a≠−1.