In development · iOS first
Collect the dogs and birds you actually meet.
A collection game you play by going outside. Photograph a dog on your street or a bird in a tree, and it gets cut out of the photo and filed into your dex as a card. The count that matters is how many you've met, not how many species you can name.
Why only dogs and birds.
Routine and surprise
There is a dog on most walks, so there is something to collect every day. Birds depend on the season and on luck, so now and then you get the one you did not expect.
Deliberately not plants
There are roughly four hundred thousand plant species: a list nobody finishes, and one that would need a paid recognition service. Leaving them out is what keeps the model small enough to live on your phone.
How it works.
Photograph what you meet
A dog being walked past you, a bird that landed close enough. Ordinary phone photos, taken where you already are.
It becomes a card
The subject is cut out of its background and mounted as a card — the animal you met, not the parked car behind it.
The dex fills up
Every encounter counts toward your total; each new species lights up an entry in your dex. Common finds and rare ones both have a place.
The photos stay on your phone.
Recognition and cut-out are designed to run on the phone itself, not in a data centre. Paying a cloud service for every photo would sink a game where you take hundreds; on the phone, each photo costs nothing to process, works with no signal, and never has to leave your phone.
Questions.
Is this a bird identification app?
No. Identification apps exist to tell you what a species is, and several good ones already cover ten thousand species. Sightdex is a collection game: the point is the encounter and the card, not the label.
When can I play it?
Sightdex is in development and does not have a release date yet. Email hello@aivmelna.com to be told when it ships.