Want to see what the earth would look like in your iPhone? Watch the video below, which was shot by Frank Taylor of the Google Earth Blog. It shows a demo of the “coolest thing” he saw at the recent Where 2.0 conference from a Boulder-Colorado startup called Earthscape..
The demo is of a mobile application (Earthscape Mobile) in development that puts virtual earth software on the iPhone. When the iPhone is tilted, the earth begins to rotate and you can navigate to another part of the globe. Taylor notes that the app was running locally on the phone, and that ideally you’d would want real geo-spatial information downloaded over WiFi or 3G, which would take a ton of bandwidth and effect performance. But perhaps his fellow Googlers will be inspired enough to create a mobile version of Google Earth for the iPhone or Android with just such features. (We can dream).
Note that what you see in the video is not Google Earth, although it looks very similar. Earthscape has created its own virtual earth program that it describes as a social geobrowser. As with Google Earth, it allows you to tag places with text, photos, restaurant reviews, and Wikipedia articles. It also lets you see different image overlays of the same spot during different seasons and different times in history. The software is available only in private beta for Windows (sign up here). Mac and Linux are coming soon.