Earthscape Wants To Put the World In Your Pocket

by Eric March on May 26, 2008 at 1:42 pm

Google Maps is cool. It’s pretty awesome having the world in your hands. Sometimes though I wish it worked more like Google Earth, with all the great social tagging and imagery and Wiki links. It’s not like the iPhone doesn’t have the hardware to do it, right?

That’s the thinking behind Colorado startup Earthscape’s current project called iPhone Earth. This SDK-based application currently under development aims to present the user with a complete, navigable 3D map of the Earth utilizing the advantages of the iPhone’s hardware. Besides its use of the PowerVR chip to provide smooth 3D accelerated graphics, iPhone Earth also uses the accelerometer to allow the user to tilt, pan and rotate their view, as well as the traditional multitouch pinch to zoom in and out.

Demonstrated at the Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco, CA on May 14th, it was running natively on an iPhone, though in its current incarnation it did not pull any meta data down to display regions, roads, or any other points of interest. It did appear to have topographical information already built-in, however. It was enough to wow Google Earth Blog’s Frank Taylor, however, so that’s saying something.

iPhone Earth is not Google Earth, however, even though it has many of the same goals. Earthscape plans on developing this application into the same sort of social geobrowser, with community layers that allow anyone to tag points of interest with landmark information, photos, travel tips, stories, links to Wikipedia, and more. Furthermore, Earthscape wants to provide users with a truly diverse range of geographic imagery that goes far beyond Google Earth, including the ability to toggle seasonal views (see what areas look like in winter, spring, summer, and fall) and even historical views using aerial imagery from decades past. Want to see the profusion of art deco-styled buildings that peppered the Manhattan skyline in the 1930s? Well, you can’t yet, because the program isn’t done. But you will once they release it. There will also be topographic and aviation map overlays available.

But wait, there’s more! How about a complete Javascript API that lets you create your own custom iPhone Earth applications? Want to keep track of where your kids go when they borrow the car? Geotag your roving blog posts? Solve the mystery of where your left socks go when you wash them? (That last feature might take a while to implement…) Now would be a good time to educate yourself on Javascripting. Or, you know, just wait for the community to develop them for you.

iPhone Earth is still in its early stages of development, so don’t expect this to be available in time for the App Store. Don’t even ask for a potential release date either, because they don’t have one. You can however sign up for the beta program if you’re really itchin’ to start digging into it early. I am. Because this looks awesome, and awesomeness is priority. But while you wait to see if you’re accepted into the beta prorgam, sink your teeth into a brief video below, shot by the selfsame Frank Taylor that was so impressed by this at Think.

(Source: TechCrunch)

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2 Responses to “Earthscape Wants To Put the World In Your Pocket”

Bloc Party said:

May 26th, 2008 at 6:41 pm

Hey, great article there.

Just one question - how much of the data would actually be stored as part of the program itself and how much would be streamed via internet?

I ask because this would be awesome to just play around with on the train etc but here in Australia we have no wifi on trains.
Eric March said:

May 26th, 2008 at 9:23 pm

It’s hard to say. The big question mark here as I understand it is the sheer volume of data such a program would have to pull down off of the 3G network. If you’ve used Google Earth then you’re probably familiar with just how much data it streams from Google’s servers, especially if you have the community layers active.

Last I heard, Google Earth eats up about 2TB just for the sat map imagery alone — not including topographical, geopolitical, community, POI, or any other layers. Obviously you’re not going to be yanking that down off the network whenever you use it, but you probably could pull down several dozen megabytes just doing some exploring.

But it comes down to a balance between the size of the app when you download it from the App Store, and the amount of data it’s going to eat when in use. My guess is that it’ll probably end up very much like Google Earth, where basic geography is stored locally, and everything else is stored remotely. Being that it’s aimed at a mobile platform though, it’s probably a safe to assume that high level compression techniques will be employed to crunch the data into as small a package as possible.

No matter what, if you are not served by a carrier that has decent data rates, then this is probably not the kind of application you’re going to want to use on the go very often. But I’m going to be very interested in seeing where this goes, as this would definitely become a killer app once it’s released.