Show HN: Wildex – Pokémon Go for real wildlife / hacker news

Please do not build apps that allow people to specify the locations of wild animals, even in parks. Poaching remains at extremely dangerous levels, and every wildlife park I know of in vulnerable areas specifically asks visitors not to use those kinds of apps or groups because it gives location information to poachers.

Some wildlife parks have ‘daily sightings’ maps at rest stops and lodges, but those are monitored by park officials who remove the most at-risk animals and are cleared at least daily.

Aside from that, apps like this encourage bad behaviour from visitors in parks that allow self-driving, as dozens of people rush to the next leopard, lion, etc sighting. That not only creates its own risks but ruins the experience for everyone else.

In short, don’t do this.

So what you’re saying is technology can be abused by bad actors and the solution is.. stop developing technology?

Good luck with that.

Consider just doing dropping the global leader board. Who benefits from it? For most, it’s a passing curiosity. But for some, it’ll be an obsession which ends up endangering them, animals/plants, and others. These kinds of contents can encourage someone who may not tromp through a delicate bog normally to decide to step off the boardwalk and recklessly go get that picture for the app points. And for 99% of the world, it’s just an additional screen with no chance of being relevant.

Replace it with a leaderboard amongst phone contacts/friended users

Consider just doing dropping the global leader board. Who benefits from it? For most, it’s a passing curiosity. But for some, it’ll be an obsession which ends up endangering them, animals/plants, and others. These kinds of contents can encourage someone who may not tromp through a delicate bog normally to decide to step off the boardwalk and recklessly go get that picture for the app points. And for 99% of the world, it’s just an additional screen with no chance of being relevant.

Someone asked for the model you use but I am also curious how you handle ambiguous IDs. Not everything is clear cut especially when it comes to fungi and bugs.

Inaturalist uses second opinions what's your solution?

Edit: cool idea for the app btw, I always call inaturalist my Pokémon deck already so I think it's a nice new angle :)

It appears the Wildex user in your 2nd screenshot is about to get mauled to death.

That gave me a good laugh

Wait, so you're saying going up to catch a mountain lion for my collection when I'm out on a hike is a bad idea...

If this app gets popular you know somebody is going to be heading to the woods with their smartphone and a 5 gallon bucket full of bacon grease to lure in a griz.

I really don’t understand silent mode on the iPhone (and I’ve used iPhones since the OG!) but your app is one of those that ignores it.

Either obeying silent mode or having an option to disable the, admittedly pleasant, sounds would be very welcome.

Good shout! thank you

iNaturalist kind of did this already right? So it's like that with more fun dopamine hits and gamification? If it gets kids outside I think that is good.

Why not Seek, the gamified version of iNaturalist?

Seek already does exactly the same thing that this app store listing advertises. You aim your camera at something, Seek identifies it as a random species, and then you get credit for that species against a big database.

People like it, but I also don't see why you'd need two Seek apps. You don't really need one, without an actual method of identifying the organisms.

Just as an example, we are currently at lady bird lake in Austin, tx and saw a turtle on the bank. It turned out to be a red eared slider turtle. The app informed us that they can breathe through their bottoms! Who knew!

i thought this was more common than it is, but it's also not rare. Claude:

Around a dozen turtle species globally can breathe through their cloacas (rear openings), with roughly half living in Australian rivers. The main species that have truly mastered this ability include the Fitzroy River turtle, Mary River turtle, and white-throated snapping turtle. Additionally, some freshwater turtles like Blanding's turtle use a more limited form of cloacal respiration during hibernation when trapped under ice for extended periods. The Fitzroy River turtle is particularly impressive, obtaining up to 70% of its oxygen needs through cloacal respiration and staying submerged for up to 21 days. The white-throated snapping turtle can get nearly 70% of its oxygen this way as well. These turtles have specialized structures called cloacal bursae—sac-like organs with densely packed papillae (small blood vessel-rich structures)—that allow oxygen from water to diffuse directly into their bloodstream.

I mostly use iNaturalist for foraging mushrooms, and have found it’s somewhat unreliable unless I already have an idea of what I’m looking for. How is this app set up for mushroom IDs? Sounds really fun and I love the concept but given some mushrooms are quite dangerous correct IDs are vital. I assume this also applies to plants?

> I mostly use iNaturalist for foraging mushrooms, and have found it’s somewhat unreliable

iNaturalist or Seek by iNaturalist? I didn't think iNaturalist had an identification method other than "wait for an expert to come along and tag your photo".

Seek, on the other hand, is happy to make up identifications itself.

Mushrooms, mosses, invertebrates and even some plants seem to rely on specific small features that aren't always captured in photos of the thing to identify accurately down to the species level.

I'm using a national app, probably tuned on national data, so your mileage may vary, but my experience has been good: the app sees different and more nebulous features than what I have been trained to see by the mushroom experts at our foraging association. I never eat anything based on the app only obviously, but I often get more specific IDs, which usually seems right when I look up the mushroom it suggests.

Russulas, for instance: in my country, there are no poisonous ones, but there are at least 90 varieties and experts will often need DNA analysis to place them confidently. The procedure for determining edibility recommended by the foraging association is, once you're certain it's a Russula, to taste a small piece and spit it out. If it has a burning sharp taste, it's not food.

The app has been very good at predicting whether I'll experience that burning sensation, and all from signs that are invisible to systematic description (I won't rule out that an expert can also spot subtle differences between a sharp green russula and an edible green russula, but they probably wouldn't be able to describe it).

No go with all the tracking.

As people are requesting we will make a paid version pronto with no ads.

As per apple guidelines you can request us not to track and the app of course respects that.

The location data is used only for helping us narrow down the collection species!

Hopefully it will not result in too many animals being harassed all day long.

1) I love the idea, but there's not a lot of confidence building, "I'm not going to harvest and sell your data" vibe here.

2) I should get extra points if I discover a new species

1) agreed by the look of everyone’s comments we need to rephrase some things in the onboarding, apple review made us change it to be explicit as possible. 2) yes this is a great idea!! ‘You’re the first in the world to discover this’!! Thank you for that!!

Thinking back to 2016 when Pogo launched there were news stories about trespassing, people getting hurt etc for virtual creatures...

I could easily see someone be foolish enough to go up to predators

We thought about this and specifically decided not to award xp based on an animals danger rating.

Even though we warn users in the onboarding to take care in the wild, TikTok and similar platforms have shown people acting foolishly is not something you can fully control

Do you put up anything when ID'ing a dangerous situation like "RUUUUUN!!!" or similar? Maybe a more serious idea would be to give some sort of visual indication of danger vs loading some text to read that says it's dangerous.

Yeah the first thing that comes up is a full page splash screen saying ‘DANGEROUS SPECIES Be careful’

So hopefully people will get the memo immediately!

If i have learned anything about UX, it's that 1) people don't read, 2) people also don't read, and 3) if you have something important to tell them, don't make them read.

What that leaves you as options is pretty limited.

From the screenshots to the text feels AI slop. Haven't tried it but the store page doesn't give a good vibe and there are quite a few like this out there to make a quick buck.

Dude... unstoppable ads as first thing experience I see after collecting first plant completely killed the vibe for my daughter.

How does it identify the animals/plants? Is there a specialized model for that?

Cornell'd Merlin Bird ID and eBird are real life pokemon go!

Gamifying encounters with wildlife... an idea that disrupts ecosystems.

Leave wildlife alone.

Taking pictures of, let’s face it, mostly plants is pretty low impact compared to other things that are much more widely accepted. For example having a cat. Let’s maybe stop keeping apex predators as pets that decimate the local ecosystem first and then we can talk about people outside on their phones taking pictures.

Has ads. Better to use Inaturalist or Seek.

Have you taken a look at Picture Insect and Picture this (for plants, original). the incumbents are very specialized, making a simple app for all nature sounds ambitious. I never did find one for bird sounds, but that would be an interesting niche.

You have a snow leopard in your app screenshots. The Chinese woman just made the latest news cycles about being mauled by attempting to get a selfie with one. I hope those who use your app will ensure they are taking photos from a very safe distance.

(semi serious) are there any ways to distinguish photos from being taken up close with no barrier vs behind plexiglass in a zoo?

I don’t think you’d want to solve for plexiglass since not all zoos have that but you could just cluster sightings and if you have 1000 sightings in a very particular location it wouldn’t be hard to identify.

Zoos (and similar places that house animals) are generally pretty large. You could probably just use openstreet data to check where the player is.

was just hoping for a random vision expert to come along and tell me this is solved in some model lol

The second photo is a tiger lunging at the camera ready to kill the user.

[dead]

Why not iNaturalist?

iNaturalist is great for identification and information, but it lacked the fun and soul we were looking for.

It doesn’t feel like you’re playing when you use it, it feels like you’re in biology class (no hate to them).

Wildex gives you cute fun facts and lets you build up points for rare species finds. It feels like a completely different experience.

iNaturalist specifically has a gamified Seek app for new users which is more approachable and has more 'fun' elements than the main iNaturalist app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/seek-by-inaturalist/id13532241...

> It doesn’t feel like you’re playing when you use it

That's a feature, not a bug. Gamifying nature is a bad idea. It's tourism, but with the worst kind of tourists.

Respectfully disagree here, the more people you could get outside appreciating and learning about nature, the better it can be preserved for future generations. Whether it’s gamified or not.

> the more people you could get outside appreciating and learning about nature, the better it can be preserved for future generations.

I don't know about that. We are with so many people now and there is so little nature left. The Pokemon 'Go' craze showed what happens when you set gamification and outdoors on the same track. It just doesn't scale in the same way that virtual things do.

At the same time, learning doesn't have to be boring. Most people don't care about the family/class/genus lineage. They just want to know a) what it is, b) some other interesting facts. Sure, have a link to the drudgery, but having something fun/interesting that gets/keeps people excited about going outside and enjoying nature is not a bad idea. Just because gamifying has been used for bad by others doesn't mean it's bad for everything. Nose, despite face; baby/bathwater types of things come to mind here.

Fully agree here.

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It's all porn. Sigh, I hate this world. I really do feel like 2020 was the timeline alternating enigma event and we can never go back

Can we get a paid version with no linking? Your 3rd party ad / tracking isn’t compatible with my desires.

Otherwise looks fun!

Definitely soon, we just wanted to build a version that everyone can use regardless of income.

Unfortunately inference costs means we needed something (ads) to keep the servers online.

Out of curiosity what would you say is a fair price for this?

I would not pay monthly but I would pay lifetime like 10 or 20 bucks.

Seek is free and good so if I’m paying for the fun aspect I would probably cap out around $20

Edit: might even be able to pull off like $10/yr but I’m increasingly tired of those as well

Nice thank you so much!