Would you buy this app idea & if so, for how much?

[superc0ntra]

I'd buy an app like that. The camera identification feature is a great idea.
I'd also buy a similar app that identifies animal tracks by camera, does anyone know if one exists?

 

[Ogri the trog]

I have been resisting writing this reply for days but I can't hold out any longer...

No, I would not buy this, nor any other "App" that tells me how to "forage" or "survive"!

And here are the reasons why;
1, I am very old school - I would not trust any battery powered device to hold sufficient charge to make the information worth-while. Not only that but it might encourage folk to try to remember the edible amongst the toxic - without really "learning" which is which. I have a mobile phone that has "Apps" on it but I don't know what most of them do - I would rather learn about that topic that interests me and not how to read about it on the smallest screen that I own.
2, Toxic look-a-likes, some deadly species can appear visually very similar to edible ones - without a "percentage of certainty" or many warnings that reference each species and those that it may be confused with.
3, Categorisation - There are numerous reference books that are categorised according to out-dated information and ideas, if your information appears confusing to a reader, it might not be the success that you hope it to be.
4, If I were to buy any information about Fungi, I would want to see that it is endorsed by a well-known name.
5, Price, Cost & Perceived Value - when compared to the books I own, and have searched for and treasure - a "£3 phone App" is something that I would treat as "disposable" information - something that I would not care if it became corrupt or got lost.

Sorry to be such a negative responder - but if it is market research you are after.....

Ogri the trog

 

[dwardo]

Maybe in another 5-10 years when the technology is there. I am sure folks said the same about books to ID things - well its not as good as person to person training or the older teaching the young.

Try google image searches now its its nigh on useless. The eye does so much more than a flat 2d scanned image can ever do. I would also want a built in DNA reader to be sure Chop off a leaf/bit of fungi which ever and rub it on the pad on the back of the device and within seconds a DNA profile match. Then shortly after i can teleport home rather than lugging all my kit and tools out again.

 

[rickcull]

If this were possible it wouldn't be worth £3 but at least £3 billoin your talking about an AI object recognition system running on a smartphone!

Sent from my SM-P900 using Tapatalk

 

[Stevie777]

I dont see why you cant just phone an expert here...take a pic/video, send to said expert..Jobs a good un.

As rickull has said, it's a major bit of tech you are talking about here. We have iris recognition and fingerprint recognition systems that work well, but that's because every iris and fingerprint is unique to the specific owner and they are logged into a database. The database cost billions and years to perfect. see where i'm going here.?

Personally i dont believe the technology required to be 100% accurate 100% of the time has been invented yet. Fairs do's if you believe can pull it off though.

 

[Goatboy]

I don't want the OP to think we're all negative types and we've all given some good points for him to mull over. Think a major part of the question is how resistant we are to new tech. I gave some doubts earlier about the product itself but I have some doubts about myself too. I worry that having access to a database stops my own knowledge retention sometimes as things are so easy to "Google". A lot of education specialists worry about this too. It means when we no longer have access (no signal) we can be up the creek. It's one of the reasons I don't use "Cloud" storage (there are others too). A lot of us have said that we prefer books, and as a book lover I use them a lot. But on the fungi front I've seen a lot of folk with new books picking a mushroom up, having a flick through and deciding it's safe to eat. Quite often it's not. The book (can't remember the title) that shows I think it's a dozen edible fungi that are easy to ID and have little chance of mistaking is a better starting point for most. Maybe if the App was based more towards that it might be do-able & safer? Then we could think on said App (if its possible) as a training aid/primer rather than a "survival" device then we could be more accepting of it? Because if we think of it as a survival device then phones aren't likely to be an option due to the fact that charging it and getting a signal are going to be very, very difficult.


Sent via smoke-signal from a woodland in Scotland.

 

[ryemck]

Some more great replies

I think this is one of those ideas that could possibly work if it had a lot of funding and professionals behind it but not something I could do! Tends to be the case for most of my ideas

 

[Goatboy]

Some more great replies

I think this is one of those ideas that could possibly work if it had a lot of funding and professionals behind it but not something I could do! Tends to be the case for most of my ideas

I wouldn't be disheartend. If we don't ask questions we'll never get answers. I've had the odd idea in my time that could've made a difference to myself or those around me. The ones that have worked have been good. I wish I'd followed up more on the ones that could've made me a packet but hey-ho, no point being upset about what didn't happen.


Sent via smoke-signal from a woodland in Scotland.

 

[mrcharly]

I can't see it working, myself.

Plant identification is usually done by checking lots of characteristics. Leaf shape, are leaves opposing, bark type, etc. Is mushroom/fungi identification really so simple that this isn't necessary? If that were so, then people would be less likely to poison themselves!

 

[Stevie777]

Some more great replies

I think this is one of those ideas that could possibly work if it had a lot of funding and professionals behind it but not something I could do! Tends to be the case for most of my ideas

Dont beat yourself up over it. Keep the ideas coming.

20 odd years ago i thought and was told i invented something. Can you remember when the discovery channel used to run a add for wannabe inventors.? Well i applied for my inventors kit and they sent me a pencil and some paper. i jotted down my invention and sent it away.

Got a phone call from some American guy based in Ireland a few weeks later telling me my idea was unique, only trouble was he wanted 5k to get working model up and running and various other stuff to do with patents etc. I was off work unwell and didn't have £5, so told him i couldn't go ahead with the idea. His last words to me were, and i still remember them; "All things being equal" A few years later my invention hit the shops.
I only found out when a guy i worked/fished with bought a pair.

Here was my idea. only my design was better on paper and they never had a adjustment wheel in the middle, my idea was to have a micro motor turn the lens run by watch batteries.. http://dartboard.1hwy.com/sunglasses/503d1.htm

if you want to know how they work just ask..

 

[NarzaCyst]

The theory behind it is amazing and I would use it.

Unfortunately it's not possible.

I work in IT. Not programming or search engine design, etc.

I see a lot of things that make me wonder how we have gained certain technology, but identification software is more often wrong than right, and when you come to Fungi, that has 3-4 main groups, and the majority if those groups have very similar traits, technology is not able to determine the difference.

This is why humans are better at recognising irregularities than any machine.

It's would be good to get a database that people could comment on x,y,z photo, but it's not what you envisioned where it will automatically I.D. Something instantly!

 

[dewi]

Thing is though, we've all been touched by Iron Man Syndrome.

The film Iron Man starts out with traditional technologies, moves slowly through some tech built in a cave (which looks really quite plausible) and then onto Jarvis, the AI computer owned by Stark that can literally follow commands and automatically builds whatever Stark wants.

It all looks so real and believable, that even though logically we know that the technology doesn't exist to do these things, there is a little bit of our brain that is willing to accept that it might have been. Couple this with the conspiracy videos launched almost daily onto the web and all of a sudden, anything seems possible.

I remember being shocked that my iPhone had fingerprint recognition... that an iPad could identify a moving card, read the number off it and credit my iTunes account with money... its all a far cry from the early days of the home computer where you needed to alter dipswitches to install a new piece of hardware, or when you had to defrag your 100mb hard drive to make it more efficient.

Show someone 20 years ago something like a Galaxy Smartphone and they'll be thumbing through the demonic possession section in the library and calling in a priest to exorcise you!

 

[mrcharly]

The theory behind it is amazing and I would use it.

Unfortunately it's not possible.

I work in IT. Not programming or search engine design, etc.

I see a lot of things that make me wonder how we have gained certain technology, but identification software is more often wrong than right, and when you come to Fungi, that has 3-4 main groups, and the majority if those groups have very similar traits, technology is not able to determine the difference.

This is why humans are better at recognising irregularities than any machine.

It's would be good to get a database that people could comment on x,y,z photo, but it's not what you envisioned where it will automatically I.D. Something instantly!

Um, I'm not sure I agree with you.
One of my contracts involved documenting microscopy software. This software drove a motorised microscope, it would locate cells on a slide, scan them, find chromosomes, identify them (always a human sample) and pick out any damaged chromosomes. It was used in path labs.

The technology to do that pattern scan and recognition does exist. My doubts are more based on the presentation of samples. Photos taken under different light conditions, different distances, different angles etc are not going to give a particularly distinct image. I know little about fungi identification (apart from checking colour of gills) and doubt that the software could cope with the wide variations in photographic conditions.

 

[Herbalist1]

Um, I'm not sure I agree with you.
One of my contracts involved documenting microscopy software. This software drove a motorised microscope, it would locate cells on a slide, scan them, find chromosomes, identify them (always a human sample) and pick out any damaged chromosomes. It was used in path labs.

The technology to do that pattern scan and recognition does exist. My doubts are more based on the presentation of samples. Photos taken under different light conditions, different distances, different angles etc are not going to give a particularly distinct image. I know little about fungi identification (apart from checking colour of gills) and doubt that the software could cope with the wide variations in photographic conditions.

I think you've put your finger right on the problem. Pattern recognition for a single application - matching against 23 pairs of chromosomes is several orders of magnitude different from pattern matching against 100s of species (just for the fungi before you get into other groups - plants, trees etc) each of which exhibit a varying degree of variability and which require several id points. That would require a lot of processing power as well as a massive database.
Love the idea but don't think it would be executable at the present. Happy to be proved wrong though. I'm looking at his from the biological perspective (i.e. Simply the amount of data that would be needed) and I'm sure there are lots of people on here who are way more up to speed with what current computing tech can manage.

 

[ryemck]

Thanks all

I will definitely have more ideas in the future, I should say as well (since it has a lot of views) that if any of you have any ideas yourself (not just on bushcraft but in general) I would advise you to look into it and give it a shot it's surprisingly easy to make your ideas a reality!

 

[mrcharly]

Don't give up.

I would pay £3 for an app that helped identify plants, such as trees. Not auto-detection, but something that stepped through the standard identification (leaf shape, leaf position, etc)

 

[barclay03]

have a look at an app called Fungitron