As you drift along the currents in our underwater ocean world, you’ll find jellies, sea spiders, starfish, anemones, octopuses, isopods, and so many other species of marine life. Your mission as an ocean explorer is to collect as many species of ocean life as possible, identify them, and contribute to the field of science.

That’s the goal of FathomVerse, a new mobile game created by Ocean Vision AI at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, or MBARI. The free game allows anyone with a phone or tablet to participate in ocean exploration and discovery. It was recently launched on the App Store and Google Play.

Similar to Animal Crossing and Sims, this cozy game gives off a relaxing vibe. It takes a gamer deep into the tranquil realms of the blue ocean while ambient music plays in the background as they slowly gather ocean animals as part of a mission. Depending on your mood, you can set the game to play music inspired by ocean soundscape or listen to a hydrophone — a collection of real sounds of the ocean and marine animals like whales, compiled by MBARI’s underwater microphone off California’s coast.

The game offers the choice between 40 different animal missions. On each mission, gamers receive a briefing that teaches them how to identify different sea creatures through diagrams that point out important characteristics. The goal of the game is to correctly identify as many marine life as possible, and collect points along the way, while unlocking more complex groups of animal missions.

“By playing the game, you’re helping to improve AI models that researchers use to understand life in our ocean,” said Lilli Wakinekona Carlsen, engagement coordinator with Ocean Vision AI at MBARI.

Thanks to advances in deep-sea imaging technology and remote-operated vehicles, researchers are able to collect massive amounts of visual data from the depths of our ocean — including photos and videos of marine life that’s all available on MBARI’s open-source image database, FathomNet. While AI can help researchers analyze this deluge of visual data more efficiently, we still need expert humans to ensure AI can correctly sort through and categorize underwater creatures.

“We need people in the loop to continuously verify and train the [AI] models. And right now, only a small number of experts can do that,” Carlsen said.

To solve this problem, FathomVerse seeks to engage ocean enthusiasts around the world to help review and label images so AI can correctly recognize ocean animals. “We were inspired by community science apps like iNaturalist and eBird. And we set out to gamify this process of training and verifying so that more people can join in our effort to improve the AI that we use for ocean exploration,” Carlsen added.

Some inspiration for it came from another game: Pokémon Go. During the height of the pandemic, Kakani Katija saw a resurgence of the game, where players walk around and use their phones to capture Pokémon — imaginary creatures with special powers. She said that there’s a cultural phenomenon in this kind of game.

“People are putting in this time and effort to look for animals that don’t even exist. We’ve created a generation of people who could tell you all the minutia around each Pokémon,” Katija said.
“I wanted to see the same excitement for ocean life.”

Katija is MBARI’s principal engineer who led the development of FathomVerse. She said that there’s a large knowledge gap when it comes to the ocean.

“The idea that animals have evolved over really long periods of time to do incredible things, to survive a really difficult and challenging place, there might be secrets there that we can unlock if we could adequately understand and observe them,” she said.

To develop FathomVerse, Katija and MBARI software engineers collaborated with game design experts &ranj Serious Games — a Netherlands-based game development studio focused on positive behavioral change through play — and Internet of Elephants, a nature tech enterprise based in Kenya focused on rekindling relationships between people and wildlife.

“The game is an opportunity to accelerate our capabilities of observing life in the ocean while also sharing the excitement and the wonder of the animals that we see with a much broader audience,” Katija said. It’s also an opportunity to lean on AI research and “present the use of AI in a really good light.”