I knew that after someday I will come across an impressive educational ARKit app. I’m glad to report that I finally found one, and it’s called FishingGO. Well, it’s not the first one that I came across, but it certainly a very impressive one, one that is worth writing a full review about.
What is This FishingGO App?
FishingGO is an educational augmented reality app that teaches you about different underwater animal species, including the following phylum: Chordata, Echinoderms, Crustaceans, Molluscs, and Cnidarians.
The thing that makes this app so fascinating is its teaching method. What FishingGO does is placing a 3D aquarium right inside your living room using augmented reality, letting you learn about those underwater lifeforms through observation, exploration and textual information.
The app includes some sort of an exploration mini-game. Each time, the app gives the user a specific marine lifeform to locate. It shows you an image of that lifeform and you need to find it. This takes a bit of time because the aquarium is populated with many different types of marine animals the multicellular organisms. The discovery part is really nice because of that beautiful underwater sight coming to life in front of you.
It’s just fascinating to see the fish swimming around the place creating what looks like an aquatic social gathering.
Some words about play area size recommendation. The aquarium is about 1×1 meters but the fish were swimming around the place about an area of 2×2 meters. It such a beautiful sight to behold. A sight that divers get to see when they go to see beautiful fish swimming in their natural habitat.
You can use your iPhone or iPad and just move around inside the aquarium, get close to the fish and watch their movement.
Once you find the aquatic animal the game asks you to find, you need to get close to it and tap on it. It doesn’t matter if you didn’t find a match, you can continue your search until you find it. If you find the right one, the app will capture a photo of the marine-life so you can view it later. Following that, the app will bring up a screen showing you more information about the aquatic creature you’ve just discovered.
- Its name and its scientific name
- Its kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and specie
- Its average size
- The depth where it usually found at
- Which area in the world it can be found
The will help you not just see how a specific aquatic animal looks like, but also learn more about it. There is also an option to share a screenshot of the underwater lifeforms that you just found, including some basic information: its typical length, the depth that it usually lives at and which ocean or sea it can be found—all framed nicely for online sharing.
Once you finish with one aquatic animal you move to another. For each aquatic animal that you find you get to keep a card of that specific specie.You can then visit the “Cards screen” in the menu and see all the species that you have previously located.
You can then click on a card and see the relevant screenshot that the app captured for you. The image also comes with all the information that you’ve previously seen after discovering that specific specie.
Some of the aquatic animals are locked You can unlock them by revisiting a previously visited aquarium and try to find the latest specie there. Each aquarium represents a slice of living creature from a specific place in the world. This includes places like Mauritius, Seychelles, Maldives, Madagascar, Indonesia, Hawaii, Fiji, The Bahamas, Belize, Bermuda, Bonaire, Cayman Islands, Galapagos Islands, Thailand, Dominican Republic and New Zealand.
I had a really funny moment with this app. One time I was searching a specific fish like 10 minutes, only to find out that it was beside me the whole time. I was going crazy, going with my iPad inside the corals searching for it in every corner. I later found out that there is a “Hint” button that shows you an arrow to the approximate location where you can find a specific specie.
There is also an option to choose the difficulty level. Your option is: Very easy, Easy and Normal. FishingGO doe plays with you sometimes. It spawns the fish in areas that you don’t expect to find it 🙂 It tricked me that’s for sure.
FishingGo AR Experience
I was blown away by the presentation of the app. It reminds me the aquarium wallpaper I had many years ago on my PC. I sometimes just set down in front of it to relax because it was so enchanting. Many years ago my brother had an aquarium and I was always charmed by the beauty and silence of that part of nature that I don’t usually get to see. It’s at those moments that I was able to connect better with my inner self and fin be in a state of mind where I found peace and quiet.
Same goes to FishingGO app. It’s a very relaxing experience. When you are on the menu, there is also a very relaxing music. I wish there was an option to enable music when I am in the game, not just in the menu. This app can really serve as a relaxation app as well. The combination of relaxing music with the movement of the fish can be so hypnotizing. I think next time I’ll just play a soundtrack while playing it.
The fish animations are so natural and authentic. The texture quality is very good and the fish do look quite realistic.
There is an option in the menu to turn “Advanced Shadows” and “Advanced Lighting” that makes the scene look more atmospheric and realistic. The developer recommends turning it on only if you have an iPhone 8 or later device. I did experience heavy framerate drops using it with my iPad 9.7 (2017).
The AR experience was really captivating. The app does require some space and I had no issues with it. The reason you need more space is that you will require moving around the aquarium to locate the aquatic animals, some of them are hidden at the bottom, so you more need space to crouch in order to find them.
I really enjoyed using this app, but there are some things that I would like to be added or improved.
For example:
- Being able to see a short video of the specie in real life
- Have a link to a source where I can read more about it inside the app
- Have an option to interact with the fish to improve the presence feeling in the game
- Having an option to apply a semi-transparent fill-in background color to make the aquarium look like an underwater place
- Have an option to enable that menu music when inside the aquarium
- Have the ability to scale the aquarium
- Have option for drop-down on the floor to make it feel more realistic (I really like watching the shadows when fish swim in an aquarium)
OK, let’s sum my experience up.
Conclusion
FishingGO is a fantastic app the can really motivate a user to learn more about the some of the undersea life species. It will definitely appeal to those who are interested in learning more about fish and other marine life from different places around the world.
The app can motivate the user to learn more about the sea life through fun game elements of exploration and memorization. This educational value is served within marvelous virtual underwater scenes in augmented reality.
AR can really enhance the learning experience, and encourage people to learn by making the learning process a more enjoyable experience than ever before. FishingGO is exactly this type of AR experience that I am talking about. It does that in a very enjoyable, exciting and immersive way.
The app features more than 200 real species that you can learn more about in a very engaging way. All in all, if you love the topic of this educational app, I highly recommend downloading it. In my opinion, it’s definitely worth its asking price.
You can download it from the this page on iTunes.