Evolution of mobile phone has come to the stage of mobile Smartphone today. It’s not only a communication device which you can use to make calls, send SMS or emails. It’s much more. Yes, you are already using it for web browsing, gaming, social media and even as a GPS navigator.
The capabilities of hardware wrapped up in Smartphone are amazing. Their creative applications are limitless. Previously I was talking about Torque, an application you could use to access the car computer and retrieve engine status via Bluetooth.
Today I’m going to tell you about another amazing application which utilizes wide set of hardware in your Smartphone. The app is Google Sky Map and let’s takes a closer look.
Getting Started with Google Sky Map
- Go to Google Play and install Google Sky Map.
- Open the app and give it few seconds to initialize.
- It will show you a map of starts, their names and constellations etc.
- Now point the phone to sky and look through it.
- App will show you details of stars you can see on sky.
- Once you pan the phone around it will change the view accordingly.
If you like to learn about night sky and its hidden mysteries, here you have the solution. You just turn your Android Smartphone in to a window to Sky. Let’s dig deep into app functions and settings.
- Tap on the options key then go to settings.
- There you can select what to show on the map, locations settings, sensor settings etc. Default would work for most people. Let’s go back.
- You can use pinch to zoom to view more details about starts you are looking at.
- Once you tap on the screen it will give you few on screen options. There you can select what to show on map, zoom in/out and manual panning
- If you want to search for a star, planet or any object, go to options -> Search. Type what you want and app will guide you there.
- If you want to see the sky map of different date, use time travel under options.
How Google Sky Map Works?
The first thing to do here is come up with 3D sky map which won’t be a huge challenge to Google engineers. They have experience in creating Google Maps and street view. The next thing is change the view as you pan the phone. This could be challenging.
But your Smartphone wraps advanced hardware sensors. It has a digital compass and gyro sensor which will solve the above problem. App can get your horizontal panning with digital compass and vertical panning with gyro sensor.
Google Sky Map is a live example of creative combination of powerful hardware sensors and software in your Smartphone. Finally it turned out to be a very interesting and useful app.
Tags: #Android #Google