We've covered the development of Nokia 3D World Gaze from the beginning, though it never really seemed to shake off the 'beta' tag and always remained a well-programmed, interesting novelty application. Every beta app's time has to come to a close though and it seems that resources have now been pulled from the project in favour of the Windows Phone software teams. Happily, the application 'will remain operational until further notice'.

From the blog post:

Nokia 3D World Gaze grew from a research project about the links between design and user experience, where one of the topics we were examining was mixed reality based interaction. 

That research project has now been finished, and it is time for us to move on. At the same time, Nokia's focus has shifted to Windows Phone as its primary smartphone platform, and we have to reassess where and how we spend our resources.

For these reasons we have decided to conclude the Nokia 3D World Gaze experimental beta trial.  Although we are no longer actively seeking feedback about the app, World Gaze will remain operational until further notice.  

We hope you have enjoyed discovering our planet from a new perspective! Your feedback has validated many of our design decisions and highlighted the challenges with the concept.

Thank you for participating.

- Jaakko

You can read my review of Nokia 3D World Gaze here in case you still want to have a play with this innovative geographical visualisation service - any servers at Nokia's end are likely to stay up for a year or so, I'd guess.