Air Breathing AR app for iPhone and iPad

Explore the evolution of air-breathing evolution in vertebrates in augmented reality to learn more about when, where, and how air-breathing evolved.

BACKGROUND

This app is a supplementary material for a journal paper entitled “Evolutionary and Cardio-Respiratory Physiology of Air-breathing and Amphibious Fishes” by Christian Damsgaard, Vikram B. Baliga, Eric Bates, Warren Burggren, David J. McKenzie, Edwin Taylor, and Patricia A. Wright. This paper contains a detailed description of the evolutionary model and its conclusions.

INSTRUCTIONS

Move the phone around slowly to allow it to detect a flat surface in the room. When a blue square appears on the floor, position the pin within the square and tab it to to activate the interactive phylogeny. When activated, find yourself at the centre of a circular fish phylogeny at the most recent common ancestor of bony fishes 424 million years ago.
The phylogeny is a time-calibrated genus-level phylogeny of all fishes, where blue branches represent water-breathing lineages, and red branches represent air-breathing lineages. Floating spheres indicate points in the evolution of fishes where air-breathing evolved (red) and was secondarily lost (blue). By tapping a sphere, the phylogeny moves to the sphere of interest and activates a pop-up window with information on the transition in air-breathing.

POP-UP WINDOWS

Each pop-up window indicates whether the transition in breathing mode was a gain or a loss of air-breathing, taxonomical group, the anatomical structure used for air-breathing, and the inferred geological time of that transition. Species silhouettes represent the group of interest (or a closely related species), they were downloaded from phylopic.org, and they were illustrated by Christian Damsgaard, C. Camilo Julián-Caballero, Maija Karala, Cesar Julian, Zsoldos Márton, and Darren Naish.