Thanks to Jesse at Very Spatial for the tip that my friends Tom Churchill and gang at Earthscape have released their virtual globe product for the iPhone. They have developed a lot of very cool virtual globe technology and have been looking at various directions they could take it in (competing head on with Google Earth and Virtual Earth being a tough proposition!), and I think that the iPhone direction is a really promising one for them.
This first version is missing some obvious features such as search, but the slick navigation means that you miss that less than you might think. I imagine that and other features will probably come along soon though, and I know they had various other cool ideas so I look forward to seeing more good things in future releases. One thing that is missing from earlier prototypes that I saw is changing the view based on tilting the iPhone. I think this is probably a good decision - this approach had novelty value but was hard to control well, and I think that the navigation controls they have now are very intuitive.
Overall it definitely has a high "cool factor" for showing off the graphics and touch screen capabilities of the iPhone, which I think is a big factor in driving application sales at this early stage of the iPhone application platform. Congrats to the team at Earthscape on getting the product out!
1 comment:
Peter:
Thanks for your considered comments. As you correctly guessed, while the accelerometer based camera panning was a cool party trick, in practice it proved difficult to incorporate into a real product. We will probably revive it as some point, if only for the novelty factor -- but for our initial release, we really wanted to concentrate on making an easy to use, intuitive application that could act as a solid base for the many improvements to come.
And what's to come, we hope, will be of much greater value -- the obvious shortcomings (such as no search) will be addressed, of course -- but it's the entirely new kinds of uses that virtual globes can be put to in a mobile environment that are truly exciting.
Best Wishes (and see you at GIS in the Rockies),
--Tom Churchill
CEO, Earthscape
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