caryn- looking outwards 0
http://mergers.galaxyzoo.org/
While its not technically media art or design, I wanted to talk a little about Galaxy Zoo Mergers, a crowdsourcing effort by a website attempting to classify galaxy collisions. Take a look at the “Science” link on the site for an in-depth explanation of why they are doing this project and what its benefits are to science- but in short, to better understand galaxy collisions, scientists need accurate simulations of galaxy collisions and the human eye is better at helping create these than a pure computer simulation. They’ve created a Java applet which works like a game to have the user tweak simulations of galaxies to look like actual pictures of galaxy collisions. I thought this was an interesting solution to crowdsourcing- by making the participation fun and engaging, people are both entertained and feel that they are contributing something unique and important to the world of science.
Very cool. Very much in the spirit of <a href="http://www.cylab.cmu.edu/education/faculty/vonahn-luis.html"Luis von Ahn’s approach to solving large-scale problems (reCaptcha, the image labeling game, the like). I’m a little surprised there aren’t more efforts to really create an economy around this sort of thing though (like Mechanical Turk, but more in the spirit of gambling/fine-tuning existing answers to find even better answers…) Like, there have been some economics/market based projects (like the one that pays people to predict terrorist attacks), but none that have the same element of “fun” of a game like, say, poker.