Cozmic Zoom is an iPad app designed to demonstrate the scale and distance of things, from the large-scale structure of the universe down to the quarks in an atomic nucleus. You can zoom in to the microscopic world or out into the farthest reaches of space by using your fingers or a popup menu. The views are augmented with explanatory text and videos. In testing the app, I encountered several annoying bugs and design flaws, but it's a still worthwhile app for students, or anyone wanting to know more about the scale of the universe.
The app is similar to the Universal Zoom iPad app, but rather than listing the dimensions of objects such as people, atoms, or stars, as that app does, Cozmic Zoom lists the size of the field of view, which constantly changes as you zoom in and out. It doesn't depict the variety of objects (such as individual stars or types of organisms) that Universal Zoom does, but it does provide video clips and explanatory text.
Design and Features
The app can run in either portrait or landscape mode. Your tablet's screen imitates a telescope (by pinching the screen, or swiping downward) or microscope (by stretching, or swiping upward). Nearly the entire screen serves as the view screen for your journey. The screen's upper left corner displays the current width of the field of view. It ranges from 28 billion light-years at the widest view (the size of the observable universe) down to 1.1 femtometers (a femtometer is one quadrillionth of a meter), which just fits a trio of quarks within a proton on screen, at the smallest. The figure continuously changes as you zoom in or out.
Another way to navigate is found at the screen's lower right corner, in which your current view (which I call "realm of scale") is listed. Some examples of these views are Milky Way, Solar system, Earth, Homo sapiens, DNA, and Atomic nucleus. Tapping on the word brings up a popup menu listing all 19 realms of scale, from which you can choose a destination. For example, tapping on the words Milky Way takes you to a wide-field view of our galaxy.
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To the right of the realm-of-scale label is an information icon (a lowercase "i"). Tapping on it reveals up a textual description of the realm. For example, pressing the icon next to Milky Way brings up several paragraphs describing our galaxy: It tells you that it is spiral galaxy, containing 100 billion stars. Most of the stars could be accompanied by planets, with up to several billion Earth-sized worlds. In addition, there may be billions of rogue planets, not bound to any star. At the core of the Milky Way lurks a supermassive black hole, and that many stellar-mass black holes, the remnants of supernova explosions. Some terms, such as "Milky Way," "rogue planet," "supernova", and "black hole," are shown in boldface. Touching the word launches a popup menu that lets you explore the concept online with any of five sources: Web, Wikopedia, Encyclopedia of Science, World of Science, and How Stuff Works. Clicking on one opens the source within the app. To return to your previous view, you simply click Done in the screen's upper left corner.
Along with the very small and very large are more familiar realms of scale. For instance, touching New York in the menu brings up a view of the New York City metropolitan area as seen from space. If you zoom in, you will eventually see Central Park's Sheep Meadow, and then a young man gazing skyward. His eye expands to fill the screen, and the view goes even deeper, to reveal blood vessels, rod and cone cells, and eventually chromosomes, atoms, and then subatomic particles. This journey is reminiscent of the 1977 movie "Powers of 10" (and the book it inspired), which starts out showing two picnickers on the Chicago waterfront, then zooms steadily out to the outer edges of the universe, then returns to the picnickers, zooming in on a man's hand to reveal cells, molecules, atoms. Indeed, this movie was listed as a "precursor" in the app's credits.
In some places in your journey, next to the Sun, and Mars, for example, you will see video Play buttons. Tapping them will run a video clip, up to a few minutes in length, about the subject in question. A few are narrated, but most are accompanied by music. Some are fascinating, like one about canyons on Mars, and another about the eventual collision between the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy, a few billion years from now. When the video is over, press the Done button at the screen's upper left corner, and you will be returned to your previous view.
Glitches and Design Flaws
At the bottom left corner of each screen are three closely-spaced dots. Tapping on them calls up a screen that gives the app's version and build, and an email for support. At the bottom of that screen are three choices: Rate (which lets you rate and review the app on the iTunes app store), Share, and Help. Both Share and Help proved problematic. Whenever I touched the Share button, the app would invariably crash, and I would have to relaunch it. Although the Help page contains useful information (on how to use the app, the distance units used in it, and sources that inspired the app), it is poorly designed in that there is no left margin, so the text goes right up to the edge of the screen.
I encountered a couple of other issues in testing. On a few occasions the screen would freeze, for no obvious reason, and I'd have to wait (up to a minute or so) for it to unfreeze. Another issue concerned movies. If you leave a movie before it ends, you must pause it before clicking Done to navigate elsewhere. Otherwise, the movie would close, but its sound would continue to play. Generally this wasn't a distraction, as most of the soundtracks are ambient space music, but a few are narrated, so occasionally I'd find myself, say, listening to a scientist talking about Mars while I was looking at, say, blood cells or DNA.
Conclusion
Cozmic Zoom is an educational app that lets you explore the size and scale of the universe, by letting you zoom from the subatomic realm to the everyday world we inhabit to the vastness of space. It provides textual commentary as well as videos. Although the app is fun to use, I encountered several annoying bugs and design flaws in testing. Though buying Cozmic Zoom won't set you back much, a better choice in a similar app is Universal Zoom, which provided a much smoother user experience and a wider range of objects to study. Another app you should consider is Back in Time ($7.99 at Apple.com) , an app that explores the expanse of time, from the Big Bang to the present day, in a way similar to what Cozmic Zoom and Universal Zoom do for space.
Cozmic Zoom lets you journey from the subatomic world to the vastness of intergalactic space, but the ride may prove a bit bumpy.
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