News

Smartphone applications can help locate the nearest pizza joint, track overnight mail and pass the time with downloadable video games.

But impress the ladies?

"You would not believe the number of people who have told us Google Sky Map has made for a great date night," said Dominic Widdows, a software engineer at Google's office on the Carnegie Mellon University campus in Oakland, where the app was developed.

Like a handheld planetarium, Sky Map displays astronomical entities such as planets, constellations and galaxies that exist in the direction the smartphone is pointed. Up toward the heavens, down through the other side of the Earth, straight beyond the horizon -- the app creates an actual, real-time map of universal space.

Sky Map came online in May, recently surpassed 1 million downloads and has users all over the world all atwitter. The free app doesn't need Internet connectivity, so people can use it on phones even in far-off locales such as Utah's Canyonlands or Patagonia, South America, where cell towers or WiFi access are unlikely.

"This technology was taken from alien spacecraft and blows my mind," wrote one user in Sky Map's public feedback forum last week.

Kevin Serafini, a New Kensington native, and another Google software engineer came up with the idea in August 2008, Serafini said. Ultimately, four others teamed up to create the app.

"We thought it'd be cool to make a planetarium app," Serafini said, pointing to a physical model that represented what they planned to do electronically.

An office phone sat on a conference room table about two feet away. A rubber band bound a digital watch, a level, a compass, a map and an antenna to the phone.

"To make this work, we had to figure out where you, the user, are; which way is down; what time it is and what direction you're facing," Serafini said.

Serafini, Widdows and their colleagues created Sky Map during their "20-percent time" -- a unique Google policy that allows employees to work on their own projects, which bosses approve, for 20 percent of official company time.

They won a contest for best idea to use on Verizon's then-new Droid smartphones.

"We were very psyched," Serafini said.

"This would be the first app that would use all the new sensors on the Droid," Widdows said, referring to smartphone tools such as GPS and a compass.

The app also enables users to identify objects they see in the sky but don't know about, said James Powell, a Google software engineer who was part of the Sky Map team.

Eventually, Google engineers hope to add a feature that would provide data on the objects a user points to using Sky Map, Widdows said; the size of Jupiter, for example.

"And, say you know Jupiter's in the sky, but you don't know where it is," Powell said. "Sky Map helps you search for it by directing you with an arrow to point your phone in the right direction."

Sky Map is particularly useful in Pittsburgh, Serafini said, where the sun is often hard to find -- never mind Jupiter.

Google does not make money from the app, said Sean Carlson, company spokesman based in New York.

"But by creating an online ecosystem, that's good for users, it's also good for Google," Carlson said. "As the Web grows, so does Google's business."

Google doesn't release rankings on the most-downloaded apps, Carlson said.

"But a million users certainly surpassed any of our expectations when we started the project during our 20-percent time," Widdows said.

What makes Sky Map so special is that it brings people more in contact with the real world rather than simply the virtual one, he said.

"This app doesn't chain you to a desk. It makes you want to go out in the boonies."

• Most Read
• Most E-mailed
• Latest News