Marike Pinsonneault © 2025 MBAR
Inspiring a new wave of ocean explorers
Mar 6, 2025
By
MBARI
Why it Matters: We urgently need data to guide decision-making about marine life, environments, and resources. AI can help accelerate data analysis, with gamers helping train machine learning models to identify ocean animals.
Scientists are collecting massive amounts of images and video to study marine life and assess ocean health. Artificial intelligence (AI) can help researchers analyze this deluge of visual data more efficiently. However, before AI can be used for ocean exploration, machine learning models need to be trained to identify ocean animals.
MBARI is working to address this challenge with a new mobile game called FathomVerse that enlists ocean enthusiasts around the world to help review and label images so AI can accurately recognize ocean animals.
Created with our education and conservation partner, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and our collaborators in the FathomNet Program, FathomVerse allows anyone with a smartphone or tablet to participate in ocean exploration and discovery. Players interact with real underwater images to improve the artificial intelligence that helps researchers study ocean life. Available for download on the App Store and Google Play, the game combines immersive imagery, compelling gameplay, and cutting-edge science to inspire a new wave of ocean explorers.
FathomVerse aims to solve a bottleneck in analyzing visual data about the ocean.