Seek…the real life pokedex

As someone who grew up as a Star Trek and Pokemon fan, I have longed to have had something like a Pokédex or a Tricorder in my pocket. Something I can use to take a photo of something in nature, like a mushroom or a bug, and a piece of technology would be able to identify what the item is. As smartphones started to grow smarter and smarter I waited until the day someone built an app for that. 

Well, I am happy to report that someone did and the App I am talking about is Seek by iNaturalist. iNatualist started as a Masters program by Nate Agrin, Jessica Kline, and Ken-Ichi Ueda for UC Berkeley, in 2008 (About · iNaturalist ) It grew with some additional help from Sean McGregor and Scott Loarie and grew into an LLC (Limited Liability Company). From there it joined forces with the California Academy of Sciences and National Geographic.  Its core though, what makes iNaturalist tick is the community surrounding it, learning from one another, observing and teaching each other about the amazing world surrounding us. 

iNatualist, while an App in itself that helps you connect to the community to help you identify that critter, it is its sister app Seek that is in my humble opinion the star in this show. Seek does almost everything a real-life Pokedex should. I take a picture or stand in front of what I want to identify until all seven little dots light up, and there! You now know what is staring back at you. It is an app I highly recommend to all thoughts who want to learn about the wonderful world surrounding you. 

Pros:

• Identifies bugs, plants, animals, fungi, and other such creatures. 
• You get fun little badges when you find so many critters.
• It is user friendly. 
• It sets weekly goals to get special badges…but is not overly aggressive about it.
• It will id things off of camera rolls as well. (If you have a backlog of spider pictures like I do that need identifying.)
• It stores your previously found items for quick recall.
• It has community resources you can access on another app if the camera cannot ID what you are looking at. 

Cons: 

• It can take a few minutes to ID things; this could be a problem on subjects that move. Cumbersome on plants when you’re trying to defeat a shadow. 
• When it comes to plants, animals or bugs that could be potentially hazardous to a human’s health there is no warning that pops up. Ideally, I would like to see this on mushrooms, or poison ivy. 
• It can be a bit fussy about pictures in camera rolls and has misidentified a few things in older photos. 
• It doesn’t allow you to change your location. I put a butterfly I took a picture of in Florida in the app, and it wouldn’t let me switch the location from where I was currently sitting in Upstate New York to Florida…so that could mess up ranges of critters if the information being gathered is going into a community collection. 

Seek is a wonderful little app, that is available on both IOS and Android, and can be a great gateway for both adults and kids to get to know the world around them just a little bit more. 

Learn more about this app by clicking here. 

Download the app for Ios or Android by clicking the link Seek 

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Pokemon Go

a few days ago i woke up to the exciting news of a new Pokemon game. My friend sent me the video which i will happily include in this post. These are my initial thoughts

• Pokemon has returned to its root. (remembering your roots Pokemon, very cool) what do i mean by this. The old trading system had users face to face with one another actually talking to one another. Something that over the years of technology developing it the way it has, trading has become very impersonal. This seems to bring pokemon back to is original social features, with us getting out and talking to one another.
  • the down side to this could be for the people like me who live in more rural areas, where there are not a while lot of people around, of if there is another player around they could be a distance away. i would like to see how they would go about implementing something like this so that everyone feels included and its not something like only people who live in nyc can get a Mewtwo but people out in the boonies only run into Hopip.

 

• the idea of going out to the world and finding real pokemon, is really exciting to me. I am the first to admit that i am not exactly healthy and could use motivation to exercise. it seems like pokemon over the years has seemed to accepted responsibility of trying to get its players up and moving. It seems to had started with Gen 4 and the rerelease of of soul silver and heart gold with the pokewalker. I loved that thing and until the battery died and i lost it in the black hole that is my bed room, i used it a lot. I loved taking my pokemon for a walk and it inspired me to move more. I think that the idea of going out to the world and finding my favorite pokemon. I might even get myself some hiking boots.
  • the downside here could be people who live in the city. if this is implemented like certain pokemon only show up in certain spots, someone like me who has access to a verity of different landscapes, (mountains, lakes, rivers, plains and caves if i wanted. Folks in the city may only have access to city and maybe one kind of body of water.
  • another downside or possible potential hazard is the people in rural. i don’t care how good of pokemon might be ahead of me if i am in a situation where i am driving and a pokemon appears on a busy rode i will pick life over mon. They will have to be really careful to make sure pokemon don’t appear on major interstates or intersections or where going to find some injured or dead pokemon fans.
• I also love that this will be available, on a phone rather then a 3ds and here is why. I have found over the years is much easier to stuff a phone into a purse or pocket then a 3ds. Its bad enough that now a days that taking the size of the 3ds into consideration when buying a new purse.
  •  however the phone could lead to its own separate trouble. particular with data costs, or if it becomes like shuffle is now, where you have pay for certain items in the game. I think price for this new little add on may also me a major factor too, hopefully its only a one time cost but who knows.
• In some ways i feel like this game has a posiblity of giving fans something we have been asking for a very long time, a massive multiplayer game. It may not be in the way that fans had dreamed but i think it is so much more then what fans dreamed, bringing pokemon into real life.
  • my concern is they will stick to only one generation, while i am excited for go there was one thing i noticed in the trailer…all the pokemon featured were gen 1 pokemon. now i am not sure if this is because gen one pokemon are pretty much the most well known or that they are only sticking with gen 1. If its the later your leaving out 568 other pokemons. (yes i did the math…well i used a calculator.) I really hope they allow all of the pokemon to be found, i would love to find a little joltik.

There is still much to learn and i am sure as the weeks pass, we will learn more about how this works. I am sure like others i have a lot of questions, questions which i am sure will be answered as time passes. In the mean time lets just enjoy the possibility of pokemon in the real world