An article in the Atlantic bemoans the passing of the wristwatch. But as it does so, it mentions a rather interesting iPhone app:

[…] LookBackMaps, a San Francisco Web development company, has created an iPhone mapping app that lets the user overlay historical photographs of places onto the iPhone’s camera view, combining past and present in a single picture—crowding wagons and horses, cobblestones and ghostly pedestrians into modern cityscapes. […]

Here’s a video of the iphone app in action:

LookBackMaps can be found here. I’ve got some of my digital history students very interested in ideas surrounding location-based computing, and the melding of the interweb with physcial geography. My list of tools for them to explore grows every day! I had shown them what the Museum of London was up to with their StreetMuseum app; the LookBackMaps tool would seem to permit that same kind of functionality.