Creatures live in the city. Each has its own kind of place and its own way of showing itself. The device hears only a trace; who is there and how to call it out is yours to work out. Stand in the middle of a bridge facing upstream, sing an A by a fountain, meet the dawn at a bus stop, and a trail camera catches what came. Free, no ads, no accounts.
Download APK · Android 9+ · beta
- The air. A round scanner shows traces around you: the kind of place, the distance, the direction, a scrap of signal ("…splash… under… step…") and its strength. The creature itself is never on a map.
- The riddle. Each trace opens a riddle in the bestiary: where it waits and what it wants. Riddles are honest: there's always the kind of place and at least one condition.
- The rite. One to four steps, each checked by the phone: stand in the middle of a span (GPS), face upstream (compass), keep still (accelerometer), sing a note (pitch only, nothing recorded), blink a letter in Morse with the torch, walk round three times anticlockwise, climb the stairs without stopping, walk along the water in fog, leave the screen alone for a minute.
- The frame. When the rite is done, a trail camera fires: a grainy night IR frame with the camera number, the date and the time. The creature is grown from bones, torn by noise, furred and half hidden by the scene; the hour, fog, rain, snow and frost all show in it.
- Rumours. Every catch tells about someone else, so the bestiary grows as a web, not a list.
- Memory and the archive. The device has 16 KB. Frames in memory wear a step a day until you take them home and hand them in to the archive.
- Dwellers live in kinds of places from OpenStreetMap: bridges over running water, springs and fountains, long stairs, bus stops, pharmacies, street lamps, trees, playgrounds, crossroads of five roads, churches, monuments, towers, piers, underpasses, postboxes, benches, viewpoints, riverbanks.
- Keepers live in the district's most-of-all places, found on the phone: the oldest tree, the longest stairs, the longest bridge, the busiest crossroads.
- Wanderers come with the weather (MET Norway): fog by the water, rain, a strong wind, frost, snowfall, a full moon.
- Legends stand on points of the planet, like a whole-degree confluence.
- Homelings settle at your own home.
This beta has 50 creatures. A place always holds the same creature; about four in ten fitting places are empty.
The first time a screen opens, a page of the device's manual explains it; the «?» next to the title opens it again. Back from any screen returns to the air; on the air it asks before switching off. The theme (system, light or a dark night mode of the screen) and the language (system, Russian or English) are set in Device.
Coordinates never leave the phone. The network is used only for the map around you (OpenStreetMap through Overpass, cached for 30 days) and the weather (MET Norway, rounded to ~1 km). The microphone is used only for the "sing a note" step: the pitch is measured and nothing is recorded. No account, no ads, no analytics.
./gradlew assembleDebug # app.fieldscan.dev
./gradlew assembleDebug -Pdemo # app.fieldscan.demo: Zamoskvorechye, Moscow, half a bestiary caught
./gradlew testDebugUnitTest -Prender --tests '*Render*' && python tools/shots.py
Debug builds carry a receiver for testing rites at a desk (fake fixes, weather, heading, a tone); see app/src/debug.
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL). Weather by MET Norway. Font m6x11 by Daniel Linssen. MIT licence.