New App: Seek by iNaturalist

[Alex Shepard]

Hi folks,

The iNaturalist team recently got a great opportunity to work with the folks at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Tangled Bank Studios on a new app to be released in tandem with their film Backyard Wilderness. They wanted a kid-friendly app that was all about discovering the nature around you. Sounds a lot like iNat, huh? 😀

So we built an iOS app called Seek on top of the iNaturalist APIs, with a few important differences compared to the existing iNaturalist apps. Observations contain some sensitive information that we don't want to reveal about children, including where they are and when they are active (in the US it's actually illegal under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) for online platforms to record this information without explicit parental consent). Because the app is designed to be kid-friendly, we don't record any observation information. No activity in this new app becomes a record on inaturalist.org, but it uses the same computer vision model as iNaturalist to suggest identifications based on photographs taken by the users. It also suggests species that have been found in the area (based on an obscured location) and recorded on iNaturalist. Seek works because of the observations submitted and identified by the iNaturalist community, so it might work best in areas with active iNaturalist communities. 

We're hopeful this app will be fun, and not just for kids. Please try it yourself, and please encourage any of your friends and family who are into nature to give it a try.

It's currently iOS only. You can download it from the iOS App Store here: Seek by iNaturalist. We'll be exploring how to make an Android version soon. 

Cheers, 

alex

[Charlie Hohn]

Wow, very cool, neat concept. Hopefully it also acts as a gateway to iNat itself. My 2 year old is still too young to try this, but i will check it out myself.

C

[Charlie Hohn]

omg can you add this cropping functionality within the photo to the main iNat app? That would be really useful. 

Anyway looks fun and I can definitely see this as being really neat for those with geoprivacy issues or without the desire to dive into the whole website. I could definitely see having my kid use it when older, or perhaps using it myself when i'm in an area i've already inaturalisted to death, just to create yet another species list and see what kinda stuff you hid in here :)

.

[Alex Shepard]

Thanks for the kind feedback!

Adding cropping to the iOS app for iNat is very much on my todo list.

[Alysa Joaquin]

I responded to the tumblr post with some feedback. Here's what I said:

This is exciting! As soon as I heard about it, I downloaded it and tried it out. I love how the badges encourage users to keep going, and I think a simple, easy version of iNat is really important to get into the hands of kids. 

A few bits of feedback I have:

1. No zoom in the in-app camera makes it *really* hard to get good photos of things that are not large or nearby.
2. Sometimes the ID tool can’t see something because it’s too busy in the background–I saw a crane fly but the app couldn’t tell there was anything in the photo. The suggestions the app gives don’t really help with this situation, that I can recall anyway. Suggesting taking the photo against a plain background vs in the grass (put it on a piece of white paper, for example) would help.
   
3. The app can only identify things that are identifiable to species by photograph, which is really frustrating. If I was a kid trying this app out, but if the first ten things I tried included Meadowlarks, a leaf from the carrot family, and elm saplings (all things the app could not identify to species from my photos), I wouldn’t bother to keep using it. The ID tool in Seek will say “We think this is X, but we can’t say for sure which species it is,” then it gives photo tips, but there is a difference between not being able to identify from a blurry photo, and not being able to identify without doing a dissection. I get the impression this is really tricky to program, especially if the ID feature is improving as it learns from observations on iNat, BUT maybe it’s worth mentioning to the kids using the app that not all organisms can be identified from a photo and aren’t they doing a good job by finding one?!

[Charlie Hohn]

the app camera does let you crop, which does help mitigate the lack of zoom as well as helps with the algorithm. 

It is true that lots of thing sdon't register. But i think that's ok if you approach it like a treasure hunt: "not everything you find will show up on the app! Only the very best photo, and many species are still a mystery to us!". Very much in the pokemon vein really, but without being pokemon. 

I do think if you identify the same species multiple times it should track how many times. Instead of 'deja vu! you already saw a white pine' how about 'Wow! you've seen 8 white pines!'. It doesn't make sense to gamify multiple observations of the same species since you can ust hit the same thing over and over again but still... 

[Alysa Joaquin]

I do *very much* like the crop. I also do like that you can take a picture, and then add it to the app. I've never found taking a photo within iNat to be very effective for me (since I mostly do animals that RUN AWAY and there's a lot of lag time). There's always room for improvement, but I think Seek starts out very strong.

I agree about the treasure hunt approach. When I'm working with kids, I like to emphasize that there is a lot of the world that scientists still don't understand, and if they look closely enough, they might be the first person to see X or discover that Y has expanded its range.

A fun note re: Pokemon. Back when Pokemon Go was a huge craze, I would go out trying to hunt Pokemon, but I kept seeing bugs and herps and switching back and forth between iNat and Pokemon got to be too much of a hassle so I just got *really* into iNat :D There has been a lot of criticism of apps like Pokemon Go, but I think getting kids outside is the biggest challenge, and it achieved that very well. Once they're outside, they can't help but notice all the stuff they never saw before, and one spark of curiosity is often all they need.