Why I like microscopy and why I found Eureka!

To me, microscopy is mostly about microorganisms. So to talk about microscopy, I have to talk about them first.

When I was an undergraduate studying Environmental Science in China, one of my favourite courses was Environmental Microbiology. I still remember the afternoon we sampled water from a pond on a bridge, and explored the sludge under a microscope. I still have a photo of a rotifer on my phone — back then I didn't know its name, but I thought it was impossibly cool. I was, overall, a little disappointed by the course: it was mostly about using microorganisms as indicators of water quality, not about the organisms themselves. Water quality is meaningful, but microorganisms are interesting.

Michael Shribak and Kristin Gribble/Marine Biological Laboratory

Why interesting?

First, they are extraordinarily diverse. Birds and zoo animals are popular things to watch, but from a taxonomical perspective, they occupy only a few phyla. In the microbial world, the organisms you can see contain all other forms of life. There are plant-like organisms that move, and animal-like organisms that photosynthesize. If there were real Pokémon in the world, I'd say they are microorganisms: copepods, tintinnids, vorticellas, paramecia, dinoflagellates... They show you what life could look like before it settled on two eyes and a mouth. Before that familiar form emerged in evolution, many strange and wonderful forms once dominated this planet. I feel something like tenderness toward their ancient history. Maybe in another universe, life evolved in a completely different direction, and these tiny creatures are what give me that imagination.

Second, they are hidden. They exist actively in the world, but on another dimension — most people simply aren't aware of them. It's a little like wondering whether aliens exist somewhere, except these ones are real, and a drop of pond water is enough to find them. There's a particular joy in discovering something that was always there.

Third, they represent the simplicity and foundation of existence. Simple enough to become the model organisms through which we understand the very foundations of life. Take the paramecium: a single cell with no brain, no eyes, no nervous system, yet it hunts, it escapes predators, it learns to ignore repeated harmless stimuli. We call this habituation, and it is the simplest known form of memory. Through creatures like this, we started asking genuinely uncomfortable questions: what is memory? Does something so simple experience anything at all? Then there is Lacrymaria olor, the "swan of tears," a single-celled predator that extends a neck up to seven times its body length to hunt prey, then retracts it completely, all within seconds, with no muscles and no brain to speak of. Or consider the graceful geometry of diatoms, whose glass shells follow mathematical rules so precise that engineers study them for structural design. These organisms are where physics meets life, where mechanics brushes against meaning. Nature, that blind watchmaker, turns out to be most profound in its smallest work.

Of course, microscopy isn't just about microorganisms as a static concept. If microbes are already interesting, finding and observing them adds another layer of wonder. The fun starts the moment I pass a pond or a stream and think: what's in there? The world suddenly has an extra dimension of existence.

When I'm doing microscopy, I experience something close to flow. Observing an aquatic sample from the field feels like playing a slot machine. You place a slide under the microscope and see nothing, just some sediment. Move the slide a little and find a diatom. Move again, nothing. Move again and suddenly there is a mysterious moving thing. What is that? I don't know its name, and the name isn't the point. What thrills me is that this unexpected form of life is moving in a way I couldn't have imagined. I can only be awed by this miracle of evolution. Then I move the slide again and it's gone. But maybe something more interesting is waiting just around the corner?

This randomness, this excitement of discovery, can keep me hunched over a microscope for hours, asking what's next. It probably triggers the same ancient part of the brain that evolved from hunting and gathering. The prey is just much, much smaller now.

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The idea for Eureka actually started from wanting to build something like Pokémon Go. Every distinct group of microorganisms would be like a Pokémon. Players could unlock new species as they explored new places, or as seasonal changes shifted the microbial community in a familiar spot. To play, to collect, you'd need a special console: a microscope. Which is why it needed to be portable. You should be able to play it everywhere.

I pitched this idea to my cofounder Yu, and he joined. But we quickly realized that before we could build the game, we had to build the microscope, one simple enough for anyone to use, while still producing images beautiful enough to make you stop and stare. It turned out to be much harder than we expected.

But that's another story.