SOIL : Dig Anywhere

Winner of the Excellence Award in the Education & Kids Category
Best App Award 2024

Dig freely into the ground and explore what lies beneath the soil!

“Soil” is a remake based on scenes and landscapes from Let’s Explore Inside the Earth, a representative work by the Japanese picture book author Satoshi Kako, first published in 1975.
With “soil” as its main theme, this work has been newly reimagined with original illustrations created by designer Tsutomu Kakinuma.

From the time we are very young, we naturally know that soil exists.
But what exactly is soil? How is it formed? And how does it affect our lives and the lives of other living things?
Perhaps there are not many adults who can explain these things in detail.

In this work, you can learn about soil — something that exists almost everywhere around us, yet is often overlooked because it seems so ordinary.
You can also discover many different things connected to soil, such as living creatures, natural phenomena, human production activities, and culture.

This work is filled with answers to countless questions — hundreds, even thousands of them.
However, this work is still only a “created world” inside software. The number of living creatures and natural phenomena it can show is far smaller than those found in real nature.

So after enjoying this app, we hope you will go outside, look closely at real nature with your own eyes, and feel the difference between the “created world” and the real one.

Please note that some small animals and other elements are shown larger than their actual scale, because they would be difficult to see if displayed at their true size.

How to Use

◯ Tap the ground to dig a hole. By digging, you can observe what lies beneath the surface. The terrain you dig is saved automatically.
To reset it, please tap the red reset button inside the app.
You can also pinch out to move the viewpoint forward, and pinch in to move it backward.

◯ Tap the “+” button next to the soil name displayed at the top of the screen to view an explanation of the soil.

◯ Tap the magnifying glass icon at the bottom right of the screen to switch to Encyclopedia Mode, where you can check the names of plants and animals.

◯ In Encyclopedia Mode, tap the markers shown on the screen to see the names of the plants or animals connected to them.

◯ Tap the “+” button next to the name of a plant or animal to view its explanation.
To start digging again, tap the shovel icon at the bottom right of the screen.

Languages

Japanese and English

When the OS language setting is changed to English, the language inside the app will also change to English.

Supporters

NPO Arakawa Clean-aid Forum
Miyata Bussan Co., Ltd.

Production

Design, Illustration, Text, and Production: Tsutomu Kakinuma
Programming: Keijiro Iwase
Music: Shohei Matsushita / M-Swift
Supervision: Haruo Tanaka, Associate Professor, Soil Science Laboratory, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology
Supervision — Nest of the Japanese Black Ant: Toshiyuki Sato, Associate Professor, Animal Behavior Laboratory, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology
Supervision and Text — Arakawa River Mouth Stages: Kazuyuki Imamura, Director / Secretary General of Arakawa Clean-aid Forum, Doctor of Engineering
Sound Effects and English Translation: Yuki Horino
English Proofreading: Staff members of Bloomberg L.P.

Special Thanks:
Attkun, Fiona san, Joe, Jun, Mitsuharu, Ohashi san, Sakumoto, Shinjuku Mitsubachi

Contact

[email protected]