Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)

The reserachers at Palo Alto Reserach Center, i.e. PARC, want to help you view maps on small screens.

MIT Technology Review explain the technology, called Halo, like this:

"As a person navigates a map on a handheld computer, the software causes arcs representing selected offscreen locations to appear on the edge of the screen, as if the locations were surrounded by circles large enough that a portion of the arc just reached onto the screen. The user can sense how far away an offscreen location is by the curve and translucence of its arc, which indicates the size of the full circle and thus the distance to its center."

In other words, it's a bit like the navigation aids we've been using in games ("Syndicate", "Driver" etc) for years but applied to real life!