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
Gamerwoman 