The doctoral dissertation in the field of Computer Science will be examined at the Faculty of Science, Forestry and Technology, Joensuu Campus.
What is the topic of your doctoral research? Why is it important to study the topic?
The topic of my doctoral research is "Content creation in treasure-hunt location-based games". It is important because location-based games have many benefits such as being outdoors, exercising, decreasing sedentary behavior, overcoming social anxiety, increased knowledge of surroundings, and improved cartographic and navigational skills. Their global scalability, however, is a big challenge that often leads them to remain restricted geographically. Even players of commercially successful games like Pokémon complain about the lack of places to play. As a result, many other games do not even attempt to generalize worldwide.
What are the key findings or observations of your doctoral research?
Web has lots of location-tagged data, but its usability is a question and requires in-depth evaluation to be useful for gaming. Creating high-quality content from scratch also requires comprehensive guidelines to enhance the gaming experience.
We introduce five design principles - attractiveness, accessibility, clarity of location, ease of identification, and a target's lifespan - derived from a decade of experience operating our in-house game called O-Mopsi played as a workshop at the SciFest (science festival).
We first explore the potential of Web crawling to gather images including location. While crawling was successful in discovering images worldwide, only a small fraction included their location. Next, we explored Open Street Map data. It is highly reliable with accurate locations and place names. The challenge is that the data does not store any images. However, many places included weblinks such as Wikipedia and other pages which enabled us to extract images representing the location and were suitable for game playing. Third, we studied the use of social media data for creating content focusing on three aspects: image quality, location precision, and name relevance. We also developed a method called Tag-tag to extract names for the images by exploiting the semantic relationship between the visual content of an image and its user-contributed tags. We also prototype a game called Mopsify to harness the combined power of Spatial Crowdsourcing, Open Street Map data, and gamification. The gameplay required players to visit places and capture photos. Feedback from players has been positive, with reviewers accepting their content 75% of the time.
In summary, this research represents a significant step forward in the content creation mechanism of any location-based game and sight-seeing applications as well.
The doctoral dissertation of Nancy Fazal, MSc, entitled Content creation in treasure-hunt location-based games be examined at the Faculty of Science, Forestry and Technology, Joensuu Campus. The opponent will be Doctor Elizabeth FitzGerald, The Open University, UK and the custos will be Professor Pasi Fränti, University of Eastern Finland. Language of the public defence is English.
For more information, please contact:
Nancy Fazal, fazal@cs.uef.fi
