See Everything Through Your Phone: 50 Apps for Exploring a Vast World | Beat Boredom This Spring Festival

Arm yourself with knowledge apps.

The holiday has begun.

It's a chance to rest and repair, and also a stretch of time you're just trying to get through. However you spend it, you probably don't want to fritter away a rare holiday doing the same old things.

Below is our Spring Festival edition of Hack Your Life: two things a day. Turn left to pick up a new life skill, turn right to meet a few odd games. We've also run some wildly imaginative life experiments, to give your curiosity something fresh to feed on.

Happy New Year!

Out with the old year, in with the new spring — which means it's phone-upgrade season again. Workers who have set down a year of hard labor are trading their year-end bonuses for electronic New Year goods that came out six months ago.

The nightmare of the base model running out of storage is behind you. Now you have the opposite worry: answering the charge that all that power is going to waste. If someone asks why you need a phone costing several thousand yuan to pull gacha cards, raise a Travel Frog and play Jump Jump, relax — here are some apps for exploring nature through your phone, and they make a serviceable shield.

Last year we put together a list of apps on the same theme. If the "Offload Unused Apps" setting has already cleared them out, this is a good moment to look at this year's recommendations.

Turn your room into a garden

This year, ARKit in iOS 11 prompted plenty of developers to answer the call with augmented-reality features that let you explore the world in new ways and bring you closer to nature. Even with Spring Festival visitors coming and going, these apps can make flowers bloom on the mahjong table.

With augmented reality you can place furniture on your phone, measure areas, take objects apart, interact with museum exhibits, doodle stickers, cheat at sudoku, watch how a solar eclipse works, or even invite Winter Olympics athletes to stand beside you.

And of course you can use the apps below to get close to nature.

Safari Central (official site | iOS | Google Play) — as the name says, this app lets you go on a wildlife safari on your phone. Built with several wildlife conservation groups, it renders six animals in 3D: the indri, the grizzly bear, the African elephant, the jaguar, the giant pangolin and the black rhino. You can pose for photos with them, enter photography contests, and donate to them inside the app.

Plant Life Balance (official site | iOS | Google Play) fills your home with greenery. If you want to decorate a room in green, preview the arrangement here first. And if your room is already lush, keep an eye on plant cARe (official site), still in development, which syncs data from a Bluetooth soil sensor to show what your plants need in real time.

FishingGO (iOS) — the name means "catch fish," but FishingGO is a game that turns your room into an aquarium. Keep taking photos to unlock new creatures and you can find more than 200 real marine species inside it.

Peakvisor (official site | iOS | Google Play) identifies mountain peaks. We have written before about a similar app, PeakFinder, which draws a panoramic sketch of a skyline. This one works with your camera instead, showing peak names on screen in real time. Tap the peak icon in the top-right corner to pick a display mode: outline, overlay, or names only.

After Ice (official site | iOS) came out on Earth Day last year to raise awareness of climate change. Drawing on NASA data, it simulates what happens after all the ice on Earth melts, along with projected sea levels in the 2080s, then shows that water line on your device according to where you are. If you don't live on a coast, the app also offers a New York example, so you can see where the Wall Street bull stands 70 years from now.

Sun Seeker (iOS | Google Play) uses AR to show the sun's track across the sky, accurate to the hour, along with its noon altitude and the times of sunrise and sunset — even the sun's track for any city on any date. Besides AR, it uses GPS and the gyroscope to fix the sun's position.

AR Moon Expedition (iOS) builds a door to the moon on your screen. Step through it and you can look at the moon's strange terrain up close and help astronauts finish their work. To explore the other planets of the solar system, try solAR (iOS).

NASA's Spacecraft 3D (iOS | Google Play) & NASA 3DV (iOS | Google Play) — having watched the sun and moon from afar, you can also use the latest spacecraft to go look at them close up. Spacecraft 3D, from NASA, simulates spacecraft: download and print the target sheet, put it on any flat surface, point your camera at it, and the Curiosity rover or the Hubble Space Telescope appears in front of you, showing how it works. The other app, 3DV, uses AR to present several of NASA's deep-space missions — you can watch a rocket launch, the Orion spacecraft, and the ground facilities at the Kennedy Space Center.

NASA has also built nearly 50 mobile apps, covering games, education, calendars, news, weather, live streams and video. All of it is free.

Star Walk 2 (iOS | Google Play) & Satellite Tracker (iOS | Google Play) — in the northern hemisphere, the winter sky is the most beautiful and brilliant of the year. With an AR app you can learn the names of those stars, and the stories behind them, without much effort.

Star Walk 2 is one such app. Point your phone at the sky and it locates the starfield above you, naming the bodies and constellations and drawing the constellation figures over them. Unlock deep-sky objects and you can also see nebulae in 3D, which makes the view more vivid still. Its companion app, Satellite Tracker, follows the man-made objects in low Earth orbit that are visible to the naked eye — the International Space Station, Tiangong-1, the Hubble Space Telescope — and will alert you when one passes overhead. It also lists the astronauts currently aboard the station.

You can also pick a similar app: Sky Guide AR (iOS), Star Chart (iOS), Stellarium (iOS | Google Play), SkyView® (iOS | Google Play) and SkyView® Satellite Guide (iOS).

Other educational AR apps include:

• Elements 4D (official site | iOS | Google Play) — chemical reactions, simulated: print out cubes marked with chemical elements and watch what happens between them.
• FigmentAR (iOS) — walk into a portal built in AR, with a VR world behind it.
• Jigspace (iOS | official site) — a library of 3D structural models, including the insides of everyday objects, which you can pull apart on your phone.
• Shakespeare's Globe 360 (iOS | official site) — explore the Globe Theatre of Shakespeare's day on your phone.
• Popar World Map (iOS | Google Play) — explore sights around the world on the Popar world map.
• Human Anatomy Atlas 2018 (iOS | Google Play) & Complete Anatomy 2018 (iOS) & Anatomy 4D (iOS | Google Play) & The Brain AR (iOS | Google Play) — learn human anatomy through AR.
• The Very Hungry Caterpillar AR (iOS) — watch the classic children's character turn into a butterfly.
• dinosAR (iOS) & Monster Park (iOS) & Dinosaur Magic Box (iOS) & Dinosaur Everywhere (iOS | Google Play) — turn your backyard into a prehistoric park.

And these new apps are worth a look

If any of these tells you your device isn't supported, never mind — before your patience runs out, here are some new nature-learning apps with no AR involved.

• Dawn Chorus (iOS | Google Play) — an alarm-clock app from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History that uses birdsong chosen from the museum's collection as ringtones. Pick from 20 rare bird calls and score your own dawn chorus.
• Birdstopia (iOS | Google Play) — if you love Abyssrium (iOS | Google Play) and Colored Wings, Starry Night (《彩翼之星夜》) (iOS | Google Play), don't miss this bird paradise. Keep tapping to unlock beautiful birds and habitats, and sink into their chirping.
• Paper Wings (iOS | Google Play) — a physics-based flying game where you steer a paper bird and unlock bird species from around the world.
• tori no iro (iOS) — make your own bird wallpapers; already fitted to the iPhone X.
• Cornell University's Bird Academy site also has a number of browser games about birds, covering song, behavior, evolution, anatomy, feathers and more.

• Nature Watch (official site | iOS | Android) — a nature-recording platform built by the Shan Shui Conservation Center. Find out which species live near you, look up species and protected areas, share your own sightings, and help other people identify what they have found.
• Animal Guardian (iOS | Android) — identify animals quickly from their features and from photographs, and look up wildlife trade products and the laws that govern them.
• Shanghai Insects (Android) — more than 200 insect species commonly found in and around Shanghai.
• LepSnap by Fieldguide (iOS | Google Play) — a community for identifying moths and butterflies that covers more than 175,000 species of Lepidoptera.
• Collins Bird Guide (iOS | Google Play) — the app edition of the Collins Bird Guide, with more than 700 species and over 3,500 illustrations, detailing habitat, range, field marks and calls. NatureGuides has also released a series of bird and insect identification apps, though each one is tied to a particular region.
• Youqi (iOS) — a new calendar app from the team behind Mortise & Tenon and Folding Fan, which reminds you of the turning of the solar terms and the seasonal signs that come with them.
• Brian Cox's Wonders of Life (iOS | Google Play) — 3D photographs and HD video of the organisms and habitats from the British physicist's television series.

• Stephen Hawking's Pocket Universe (iOS) — a flat-design science app that explains Hawking's absorbing work across six topics.
• 3D Earth Wonder Atlas (iOS) & Earth 3D Animal Atlas (iOS) — 3D globes covering the world's wonders, its administrative divisions and the distribution of species.
• Pigeonetics (iOS) — a genetics game from the University of Utah that predicts what a squab will look like from the appearance of its parents.
• Mammals (iOS) & Wild Beasts of All Kinds (iOS) — two Tinybop apps for getting to know wild animals, their habits and their anatomy.
• MarcoPolo Arctic (iOS) & MarcoPolo Ocean (iOS) — go exploring in the deep sea, or off to the far Arctic.
• NAMOO — Wonders of Plant Life (iOS | Google Play) — follow a plant through its whole life, learn the conditions it grows best in, and get a direct feel for cell structure and photosynthesis.

Cover image: Pixabay