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I have a hard time understanding how a 3D paper reconstruction of Amsterdam generated important insights. Also not clear what important insights were generated generally: easy to toggle seems obvious when the target is active drivers. Am I missing something here?

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I think the video of the "car" moving around the paper map shows a lot of the value. You can rapidly prototype UI elements, experiment with camera angles/motion, etc. Amsterdam's streets in particular would have numerous difficult features (sharp turns, driving under bridges, tunnels, etc.) that would make it ideal for solving edge cases.

Full disclosure: I work at Uber, but not on this team, and have no insights into their process outside of this blog post.

Interesting point about the angles/motions. But isn't the same true if you simply plotter print a map of the city and also use your phone's camera? All the 3d rendering can be done later on…

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