iPhone in Education (5 of 5): Earthscape

For the last post in this series, I thought I would talk about Earthscape. Earthscape has been compared to Google Earth for the iPhone. To be honest it’s not that good yet, but it is still a really interesting application.

Unfortunately the satellite imagery is really only high quality over North America and is still quite poor in the UK (particularly East Lothian) but it still has some interesting features.

Here’s how it works:

1) When you go into Earthscape, it looks a bit like Google Earth.

2) You can ‘double tap’ or ‘pinch’ the screen to zoom in on a location.

3) There are a number of features that you can turn on and off. The main ones are place names, wikipedia entries and various photograph layers (including flickr).

4) When photographs or icon appear you can tap on them to see the photograph in more detail or to view the Wikipedia article. The below example is of a photograph that I took of Craigleith (a small island off East Lothian) a couple of weeks ago, when I first downloaded Earthscape.

5) You can up-load photographs to Earthscape by pressing the camera icon at the bottom of the screen. You can then take a picture of the view from where you are and if you are happy with the picture it is geo-tagged and up-loaded onto Earthscape so other users can see it. Here's a  picture of the whiskey shop in North Berwick to impress my friend Alan!

6) One very cool feature of Earthscape (that could certainly be used with my iPhone fieldwork ideas from yesterday) is the ability to change the view. The shot below show the view from East Lothian looking across North Berwick and the Firth of Forth into Fife.

7) One other nice feature is that the GPS function is built into Earthscape which means you can just click on the ‘GPS Home’ icon at the bottom of the screen and Eathscape will zoom in on your current location.

Summing up – in conclusion. I think this application has real potential to be a great resource. But its not there yet. What I really want to see is Google Eath for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Comments

[Alan Parkinson]

Ooohh... whisky !
Speaking of which, I need a new bottle...