How To Locate Livable Planets Out Beyond Our Solar System [Future Of Gaming]

The PSFK consulting team noticed during our research for PSFK’s Future Of Gaming report that collaborative, online platforms aimed at solving problems are incorporating gaming mechanics and challenges as a way to encourage people to participate and continue contributing over time.

One online platform operating in this space is Planet Hunters — a browser-based online platform that asks participants to help astrologers find evidence of exoplanets, or planets located outside our Solar system, using data being transmitted by NASA’s orbiting Kepler Space Telescope. Created in collaboration with Zooniverse, a collection of web-based citizen science projects, the platform tasks players with helping note brief dips in the brightness of stars which occur when a planet passes in front of it, potentially indicating the discovery of a new planet. Participants are rewarded by being named in the discovery paper and have already helped discover two potential exoplanets. PSFK spoke with the Project Lead at Zooniverse.org, Chris Lintott.

Please provide a brief introduction about yourself and your company.

My name is Chris Lintott. I’m an astronomer at the University of Oxford, where I run the citizen science projects that are collected at Zooniverse.org. Because of my background, most of the projects which our more than 400,000 registered users take part in are astronomical, but we’re in the process of branching out into a much wider variety of fields, including papyrology (www.ancientlives.org) and climate science (old weather.org).  The goal shared by all the projects is to provide an authentic way in which anyone can contribute to science.

Please tell us about the Planet Hunters. What is the idea and goal behind the platform?

The planet hunters site provides a way to assist scientists by looking for exoplanet transits – the dips in brightness that mark the passage of a planet in front of its parent star. The data we display is obtained by NASA‘s Kepler satellite, and has been sorted by automatic algorithms before we get our hands on it; nevertheless, volunteers have been successful in identifying new planets. A lot of effort has also gone into the ‘Talk’ discussion tool, which provides a space for object-orientated discussion. This allows volunteers to collaborate, and to learn from each other.

What has been the audience reaction? Can you share any stats around user engagement?

Very positive; more than 50,000 of our users have logged into planet hunters so far, and just over 5 million images have been classified. Like many of our projects, the dwell time is particularly long, well over 5 minutes on average.

We have been noticing that collaborative, online platforms aimed at solving problems are incorporating gaming mechanics and challenges as a way to encourage people to participate and continue contributing over time, what are your thoughts on this? Do you see this trend manifesting on a larger scale? 

The best example from our work is the incorporation of a rudimentary scoring system in old weather.org, where transcribing logs can earn you a ‘rank’ on board the ship in question. This has been remarkably effective at persuading already engaged volunteers to remain with a task, and is something we’d consider for future projects. The clearest example from citizen science is the development of Fold.it, which really is a game, complete with scores and competition. We’ve found, however, that precisely because game like elements are effective in changing the behaviour of classifiers one needs to be very careful; in an early Galaxy Zoo trial providing ongoing feedback in the form of a score actually worsened the overall performance of classifiers, primarily because good people left once they realised they were scoring well.

Thanks Chris!

Planet Hunters

To learn more about what’s going on in the gaming space today, order a copy of PSFK’s Future of Gaming report.