Quest: How would you gamify SETI…BrainCue has a cue…

This is a guest article written by BrainCue.

Gamification is definitively a buzz-word for 2011. For all reader that aren’t familiar with this subject:

1. Gamification means ‘the use of game mechanics & rewards for non-game applications in order to increase engagement and loyality. 2. There’s the potential for adding fun at boring activities and using gamelike activities to solve bigger issues.

BrainCue is a german start-up and it’s in the game of developing game-layers for different business sectors and branches. Just recently BrainCue stepped over a brainteaser that was announced by Gamify and SETI.

Task: How would you gamify SETI? You can find further information here.

Our approach: First focus on the experience the “players” will have, and focus on the business objectives secondly.

So, we thought about a game that’s already successful and it’s gamedesign can easily be transfered on the task – like a gamelayer. After we”ve seen the Waterfalltool to visualize audio-data (like it’s also being used at submarines to “see” the audio-data produced by the sonar) we thought immediatley at games like tetris.

The waterfall plot above is the simplest we have. The data looks like static because during this time period and at this frequency   range there were no signals except for random static. Below is an example of a waterfall that does contain a signal. This is the very weak signal detected from the Voyager spacecraft which is now outside our solar system speeding away from earth. See the the diagonal line? That is the signal, tilted due to the doppler effect.

As you can see, Tetris also uses the vertical timeline like the Waterfalltool. But instead of using a horizontal frequency-line what if we use colors for displaying different frequencies? As we know there are signals visible in a waterfall plot that the software fails to recognize.

 

For instance, here is a squiggle shaped signal. What is it? We currently have efforts underway to write an efficient algorithm to detect this kind of signal.

If every frequency has its own color then patterns have its own color, too. On this way every person could easily detect pattern or pattern-like figures and then adding the missing links. We have taken Tetris just as example for a fitting game because of its publicity. We think that the app-game MrGiggle will fit much better because it has a structure more flexible then Tetris.

How the SETI-Game will work:

People are playing a game like MrGiggle that is connected to the SETI program. While the lines are going down the “stones” following from above (and the color) are generated out of the Waterfalltool. Every frequency has its own color and the time line of the waterfall represents the time line of the game. While the user is trying to find patterns inside the game and for example tries to add a missing stone that is filling the gap perhaps he’s detecting a uncommon pattern at the same time.

Rules of the game:

It’s the goal of the game to connect stones with the same color with as few stones as possible. The player starts with a certain amount of different colored stones that he can uses to fill the gaps. If there is a signal that can be seen on the waterfall but at the same time is being missed by the algorythm then it will appear as a colorscheme within the game and the player sees the pattern. The player marks it, it dissapears, the player gets the points and the possible pattern will be sent to SETI.

The success of games like Tetris and MrGiggle already proved that they are sticky and are spread fast and widely within the communities. So this approach would first focus on the experience the “players” will have, and focus on the business objectives secondly   Mission accomplished.

Please feel free to add comments, evaluate, critize and develop it further. Let’s gamify SETI.