Where on the Blue Marble?

Where on the Blue Marble is a new web-based game with two distinct objectives: 1. Edutain people using awesome Earth observation pictures and space mission information in an addictive way, and allow them to easily share their excitement via social media. 2. In return provide NASA with quality information (based on scores) of their photo repositories, sourced from the crowd.

This project is solving the The Blue Marble challenge.

Description

VOTE FOR US NOW

Please press the green button at the top of this page or click HERE to vote for us by sending a simple tweet.

ASTRONAUT PHOTOS

After 50 years of space exploration there are millions of great images of our planet. These images are very popular with the general public, providing great opportunities to involve them in spaceflight. There are many portals where people can access these photos, but these are often hard to find. By building an attractive, accessible, easy to play game and linking it to social media, we aim at bringing these fantastic photographs to a much wider audience.

TEAM

  • Jaap Meijers @tjaap - Journalist and @Twisst developer. Also knows MySQL
  • Arjan Eising @eising - Developer and our professional hacker
  • Remco Timmermans @timmermansr - Professional space tweep
  • Erik Harperink @eharperink - Developer
  • Stef Boerhout Database and network specialist

THE GAME

Where on the Blue Marble is a new game that uses the power of the crowd to reach two goals:

  1. Edutain society - By playing a fun game people learn about several aspects of space exploration and Earth observation from an astronaut point of view. They see the many different landscapes of our planet. They see great improvement in picture quality over the years. By misplacing photos they learn to appreciate commonalities between continents. They should realize that our planet is a fragile oasis, with only a very thin atmosphere that protects us. We try to make it viral by adding social media integration- share high scores with friends on Twitter.

  2. Improve photo repositories - Provide automated and crowd-sourced feedback to NASA about the quality perception of their photo repositories. By collecting the scores, NASA will be able to judge public perception of the photos. Photos that are frequently misplaced are assumed to be of worse quality, and hence less attractive. Photos that receive better scores are assumed to contain more features that allows people to position them more accurately, which marks them as more attractive. These scores could lead to quality management measures (delete the ugly non-distinct pics from the database) and also to astronaut instructions for future photo sessions on ISS or other space missions.

PLAY NOW

This game is not a concept. It is reality! Play it now at whereonthebluemarble.com


Project Information

License: MIT License
Source Code/Project URL: https://github.com/arjaneising/where-on-the-blue-marble

Resources

Official App Facebook Page - https://www.facebook.com/WhereOnTheBlueMarble
Official App Twitter Account - https://twitter.com/WhereOnMarble
Official Game Website - PLAY THE GAME HERE - http://www.whereonthebluemarble.com/