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Mixing mobiles with crowdsourcing and gamification hauntingly promising

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Mixing mobiles with crowdsourcing and gamification hauntingly promising
By Cal Pierce on Mar 21, 2012

With the huge amounts of data being generated by users via digital cameras, smartphones and the like, researchers and companies can still be left wanting for data. While this seems absurd, it is quite often the case that the data deluge that comes in is generated only in highly-trafficked areas. In other words, it‟s info feast or famine. So, the question begs: How do you convince people to go out of their way to collect data, be it imaging or otherwise, for you? Professor Fabian Bustamante, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University, thinks he has found a way via gamification. In a paper titled “Crowd (Soft Control: Moving beyond the Opportunistic,” Bustamante and his team coerced mobile users into taking pictures of areas lacking imaging data by creating an augmented reality „ghost hunting‟ game called Ghost Hunter.

The game told users where they could find ghosts and awarded points once a picture of the spectre, in reality and un-photographed area, was captured and uploaded. “We can rely on good luck to get the data that we need,” Bustamante said in a Northwestern release, “or we can „soft control‟ users with gaming or social network incentives to drive them where we want them.” Spookily enough, the approach seemed to work. Bustamante found that players were willing to go out of their way, sometimes far out, in order to play the game. Currently, researchers depend on sites such as Flickr to acquire low-cost or free visual data. Others, such as Google‟s Street View depend on dedicated and expensive surveys. However, most images of a particular object or building are taken from similar angles. For example, have you ever seen a picture of Buckingham Palace‟s back wall? Bustamante told Opinno that many types of organizations could use this approach. For example: cell phone companies, who regularly send crews out to map their coverage, could instead use user data governmental agencies performing noise pollution monitoring game studios trying to create more realistic rendering of real spaces at scale Real estate businesses crowdsourcing unique images of listed properties

While other crowdsourcing initiatives exist such as Berkeley‟s BOINC distributed-computing platform(famously started by SETI@home), Bustamante said that even though he is a BOINC fan, it has a week incentive models that limits adoption. “Not everybody wants a screen saver and, sadly, not everybody cares enough about science progress,” he said. Ultimately, Bustamante believes there are many app models that could use this we are only seeing beginning. Who knows, in a few years we may be seeing myriads of „tourists‟ taking pictures of seemingly random places when in reality they are simply out of cash and are earning points that can be redeemed at Starbucks.

Summary
With the huge amounts of data being generated by users via digital cameras, smartphones and the like, researchers and companies can still be left wanting for data. While this seems absurd, it is quite often the case that the data deluge that comes in is generated only in highly-trafficked areas. In other words, it’s info feast or famine.

Description
Professor Fabian Bustamante, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University, thinks he has found a way via gamification. His team coerced mobile users into taking pictures of areas lacking imaging data by creating an augmented reality ‘ghost hunting’ game called Ghost Hunter.

“We can rely on good luck to get the data that we need,” Bustamante said in a Northwestern release, “or we can ‘soft control’ users with gaming or social network incentives to drive them where we want them.”

Tags: Crowdsource, Crowdsourced, Crowdsourcing, gamification, ghost, Ghost Hunter, Mobile

Posted by Luis Enrique Morales

Jun 01, 2012 05:48 am GMT Viewed 1143 times

Author: Cal Pierce Source

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