Lifeform 🌿 — Turning Outdoor Exploration Into a Nature Discovery Game

Description and use

Lifeform lets users explore nature, photograph living things, receive AI identification, and build a digital collection with gamified progress.

Problem

People spend too much time scrolling instead of exploring nature.

Outcome

Lifeform enables users to engage in outdoor exploration, identify living things with AI, and track progress through gamified mechanics, demonstrating the feasibility of open-weight AI in real-world applications.

Workflow

• Explore outdoors and find an interesting living thing.
• Upload a photo to the app.
• Receive AI-generated identification, confidence level, and description.
• Add the discovery to a personal collection.
• Earn XP, level up, complete daily missions, and track progress.
• Record observations in a Field Journal and build exploration streaks.

Evidence

With Lifeform, you can photograph a plant, bird, insect, fungus, or other animal and ask an AI naturalist to identify it.

Source

I built Lifeform using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Node.js, Express, MongoDB, and open-weight Gemma models.

Source

During local development, I used Gemma 3 4B through Ollama.

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For the hosted version, I integrated Gemma 4 through Google's GenAI API.

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AI identifications can be wrong, so results should be treated as suggestions rather than scientific confirmation.

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