Sea Life Paris Val d'Europe in France has launched an educational, gamified app.

The Sea Scan app is the first of its kind and has the ability to recognise and identify sea creatures in real-time.

Sea Scan was created in collaboration with Sea Life and start-up Tiko, a project set up by students at ECE Paris (Ecole D'ingénieurs, an engineering school).

It combines augmented reality and artificial intelligence to help guests learn more about the species in the aquarium, while offering entertainment through quests and quizzes.

The app works by visitors capturing the species they want to know about in the viewfinder of the smartphone camera.

The app then recognises the observed species in real-time and once the species is identified, an information sheet appears.

Guests are encouraged to capture as many species as possible through a gamifying aspect – for each species identified, a small amount of money is donated to associations working for the protection of nature.

Sea Scape is free to download and is available in seven languages (French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese).

Sarah Le, a member of the Tiko projec'ts design team, said: “We decided to focus on ocean awareness because we realized that many people today are not aware of the importance of preserving the oceans.”