ABSTRACT

Modern mobile phones are equipped with many sensors, which can increasingly be used to sense various environmental phenomena. In particular, mobile sensing has enabled crowdsourced data collection at an unprecedented scale. However, as laypersons are involved in this, concerns regarding the data quality arise. This work explores the gamification of smartphone-based measurement processes in practice by embedding a sensing task into a mobile minigame. The underlying idea is – rather than to educate the user on how to correctly perform a measurement task – to opportunistically execute the measurement in the background once the smartphone is in a suitable context. To this end, this paper presents the design and evaluation of SpaceMaze, a smartphone game with the goal of minimising user error by introducing appropriate game mechanics to influence the phone context, using the example of mobile noise level monitoring. A large user study that compares SpaceMaze to two non-gamified apps for noise level monitoring (N = 360 in total) shows that SpaceMaze can successfully reduce user errors when compared to simple non-gamified ambient noise level monitoring applications and that the minigame is generally perceived as being enjoyable. Solutions for remaining problems, such as noise generated by the players, are discussed.

摘要

现代手机配备了许多传感器，可以越来越多地用于感知各种环境现象。特别是，移动传感以前所未有的规模实现了众包数据收集。但是，由于非专业人士参与其中，因此出现了对数据质量的担忧。这项工作通过将传感任务嵌入到移动迷你游戏中，探索了在实践中基于智能手机的测量过程的游戏化。其基本思想是——而不是教育用户如何正确执行测量任务——一旦智能手机处于合适的环境中，就在后台机会性地执行测量。为此，本文介绍了SpaceMaze的设计和评测，一款智能手机游戏，其目标是通过引入适当的游戏机制来影响手机环境，以最大限度地减少用户错误，使用移动噪音水平监控示例。一项大型用户研究，将 SpaceMaze 与两个用于噪音水平监控的非游戏化应用程序进行比较（N  = 360）表明，与简单的非游戏化环境噪声水平监控应用程序相比，SpaceMaze 可以成功减少用户错误，并且小游戏通常被认为是令人愉快的。讨论了剩余问题的解决方案，例如玩家产生的噪音。