ShroomDex: Pocket Guide to the world of Fungi

Inspiration

Our inspiration came from a shared love for the outdoors and a fascination with the hidden world of fungi. We realized that while foraging for mushrooms is a deeply rewarding experience that connects you with nature, it's gated by a steep learning curve and a legitimate fear of misidentification. We'd find beautiful, strange mushrooms on hikes and ask ourselves, "What is this? Is it edible? Is it rare?" The process of digging through dense books or posting blurry photos to online forums felt archaic. We were inspired by the simple, powerful interface of apps like Pokemon Go and thought, "What if we could create a 'Pokedex for Fungi?'" A tool that uses the magic of AI to make the world of mycology accessible, safe, and incredibly fun for everyone, from the curious hiker to the dedicated forager.

What it does

ShroomDex is a comprehensive pocket guide to the world of fungi. At its core, it does three things:

Identifies: Users can take a photo of any mushroom, and our AI instantly analyzes it to provide the most likely species. Each result is presented with a confidence score and detailed information.

Educates: For each identified species, the app serves as a digital field guide, offering crucial data on edibility, detailed physical descriptions, habitat information, and most importantly, clear warnings and photos of dangerous look-alikes. This focus on safety is non-negotiable.

How we built it

Vibe coded it lol

Challenges we ran into

telling Ai to download relevant images then doing it myself.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

First and foremost, we are incredibly proud of the accuracy and safety focus of our AI model. After countless hours of training and tuning, our model achieved over 70% accuracy on our validation set for the most common mushrooms available