FathomVerse is a free mobile game that invites players to contribute to science. By playing mini-games and interacting with ocean imagery, gamers contribute to identifying ocean animals and training AI models design to help discover and understand life in the ocean.
Players tackle minigames to view imagery collected by researchers and discover ocean animals. The aim is to hone one’s skills and learn how to identify more than 50 groups of ocean animals. Players can save and share their favorite images, and curate a personal gallery. Moreover, participating in quests is a way of earning badges for gameplay contributions. Furthermore, players unlock awards upon expanding their knowledge of ocean animals, which the gameplay directly contributes to training a custom AI model design for marine life research.
Scientists estimate that anywhere from 30-60% of life in the ocean is still unknown to science. Filling that knowledge gap is vital to understand how all ocean ecosystems are being impacted by climate change, particularly in light of current plans for sea floor mining that can have disastrous impact on local flora and fauna. To make quick progress with documenting and understanding marine animal species, a dedicated AI model can be a powerful tool but requires high-quality human-verified data, which playing this game seeks to provide. In that sense, it follows similar principles as earlier citizen science games like Galaxy Zoo or Galaxy Cruise1.
- See https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zookeeper/galaxy-zoo/ and https://galaxycruise.mtk.nao.ac.jp/en/ respectively. ↩︎