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Now that all these Niantic employees have some free time on their hands, anybody wanna collab on making pokemon go but for actual species in different locations

by culi 3y ago

Now that all these Niantic employees have some free time on their hands, anybody wanna collab on making pokemon go but for actual species in different locations? iNaturalist is a crowd-data citizen science platform where people post observations of any species ever and others help to identify. A really rich source of data to play with. Perhaps you can get some sort of playing card everytime you've submitted a "research-grade" observation to the platform. People travel to different countries for specific pokemon. Imagine doing this but for actual species of plants/animals. Imagine sitting down and researching migration patterns of a rare bird to be one of the few to have it in your collection

culi 3y ago
wow this actually got upvoted really fast. It's an idea that's been bouncing around in my head for a long time now so I'm glad to see excitement about it even though I shoehorned it in to a barely-relevant HN thread (sorry). It should be really easy to get an MVP of this idea going given that the data is already there. The biggest design struggle I've actually had with it is figuring out an actual engaging game to make with it. It could be something like CryptoKitties (sorry to bring up NFTs but I think those ideas often have the same problem. They have a good "collection" idea at the root and then aren't really sure what to do with that collection) where you mainly maintain a collection and then "games" are a layer on top of that that anyone can make with the underlying data. Hope this isn't against the rules, but my email is in my bio if anyone's serious about furthering this idea or just wants to chat about it
PaulHoule 3y ago
See https://ebird.org/home https://ebird.org/home
- culi 3y ago
  eBird is also cool. Both projects contribute their data to GBIF. But I'm more of an amateur botanist than a birder. I've actually found that more birders use iNaturalist than eBird also despite eBird being focused more on birds specifically
thinkmassive 3y ago
iNaturalist is already integrated with the Seek app, which has badges and challenges. My biggest complaint is the image detection could be better, but I’m sure there’s plenty of room to improve the gamification aspect too. https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app
- culi 3y ago
  Yes I use Seek. It's primarily just iNaturalist's identification AI with a tiny bit of gamification. Badges are cute but it doesn't really go past "observe 10 bird species", "observe 100 bird species", "observe 1,000 bird species", etc. There's monthly challenges too but they're usually just "observe 10 [herbivores|parasitic plants|species in protected areas|etc]". Don't get me wrong I love the app and everything iNaturalist is doing but it's not a full-featured game by any means
  - thinkmassive 3y ago
    Haha I’m with you! It’s especially frustrating when I’ve observed a few new species, then “enroll” in a challenge and they don’t count. I use the app exclusively for identification, but it feels like there’s so much untapped potential, which you summarized very well.
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by culi 3y ago

culi 3y ago

wow this actually got upvoted really fast. It's an idea that's been bouncing around in my head for a long time now so I'm glad to see excitement about it even though I shoehorned it in to a barely-relevant HN thread (sorry). It should be really easy to get an MVP of this idea going given that the data is already there. The biggest design struggle I've actually had with it is figuring out an actual engaging game to make with it. It could be something like CryptoKitties (sorry to bring up NFTs but I think those ideas often have the same problem. They have a good "collection" idea at the root and then aren't really sure what to do with that collection) where you mainly maintain a collection and then "games" are a layer on top of that that anyone can make with the underlying data. Hope this isn't against the rules, but my email is in my bio if anyone's serious about furthering this idea or just wants to chat about it

PaulHoule 3y ago

See https://ebird.org/home https://ebird.org/home

culi 3y ago
eBird is also cool. Both projects contribute their data to GBIF. But I'm more of an amateur botanist than a birder. I've actually found that more birders use iNaturalist than eBird also despite eBird being focused more on birds specifically

thinkmassive 3y ago

iNaturalist is already integrated with the Seek app, which has badges and challenges. My biggest complaint is the image detection could be better, but I’m sure there’s plenty of room to improve the gamification aspect too. https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app

culi 3y ago
Yes I use Seek. It's primarily just iNaturalist's identification AI with a tiny bit of gamification. Badges are cute but it doesn't really go past "observe 10 bird species", "observe 100 bird species", "observe 1,000 bird species", etc. There's monthly challenges too but they're usually just "observe 10 [herbivores|parasitic plants|species in protected areas|etc]". Don't get me wrong I love the app and everything iNaturalist is doing but it's not a full-featured game by any means
- thinkmassive 3y ago
  Haha I’m with you! It’s especially frustrating when I’ve observed a few new species, then “enroll” in a challenge and they don’t count. I use the app exclusively for identification, but it feels like there’s so much untapped potential, which you summarized very well.

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