Night Knights: creating awareness on light pollution through gamesGloria Re Calegari

Irene Celino

Andrea Fiano

La Palma, April 20th 2017

About the STARS4ALL project

H2020 European project aiming at:

fighting light pollution

defending the “stars for all citizens” right

encouraging citizens to care and preserve European skies’ darkness

creating awareness about light pollution

http://www.stars4all.eu/

Creating awareness through games

We are exploring a different kind of incentive to engage a possibly larger audience: fun through games.

In the mean time, we are solving an issue related to light pollution research, to take a step forward to detection and measurement of the phenomenon

Light pollution as seen from above

Astronauts on board of the International Space Station (ISS) take a lot of pictures as part of their activity

NASA makes all those pictures available for free use online

Still we need to tell the pictures we need (i.e. cities at night) apart from all other photos

Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti taking pictures from the ISS windows during her space service

Stars and completely black images

(to calibrate light pollution measures)

Classifying ISS pictures

Cities at night

(primary objective)

Aurora borealis ISS Daylight or mixed

Night Knights www.nightknights.eu

Game with a Purpose, i.e. pure gaming application that “hides” a computational task

Users play to achieve the game goals, but their actions contribute to the solution of the ISS image classification issue

Multilingual Web application with responsive design to be easily played on mobile devices

Game mood related to astronauts, spaceship crew, countdown to lift-off, space mission, etc.

Night Knights gameplay www.nightknights.eu

Double-player mechanism with 1-minute game timer

Goal to pick the same category for each picture

Gain points for agreements

from agreements between players we can derive the pictures’ “true” classification (cross-validation)

Night Knights incentives www.nightknights.eu

Personal profile and leaderboards (all time and last 10 games best players)

Badges for specific game achievements

Access to and download of the most beautiful pictures you played with

Night Knights initial evaluation

Images to classify

Images classified

% images classified

N° players N° games played

Total time of classification

Avg number of players to classify an image

1195 972 81 145 956 09h 02m 50s 9,4

Number of users required to

classify the 972 images

Throughput (task/hour)

ALP (time/player)

Expected Contribution (task/player)

107,4 03m 44s 6,7

GWAP metrics

Task-solution metrics: number of solved tasks, solved tasks per unit of time (throughput), average number of users to solve a task, etc..

User-based metrics: number of players, total played time, Average Lifetime Play - ALP, number of tasks solved by each player (Expected Contribution), etc...

Distributions of users required to classify the different categories of images

Stars Aurora

? ?

BlackCity

?

Conclusions

Many images can be classified and thus can be used for further studies on light pollution

The classification comes from free and users have fun while playing the game

Users can see how our earth looks like from the space and can become aware of light pollution problems

A wider set of people could be reached using a gameful and fun application

Thanks for your attention! www.stars4all.eu

Gloria Re Calegari

Irene Celino

Andrea Fiano

www.nightknights.eu