Last month's Wired had an excellent article on Luis von Ahn, inventor of the CAPTCHA, who has devoted himself to designing games that get people to do useful work. These are the digital cousins of the African merry-go-rounds that dig wells: projects that get people to have fun while adding metadata to photos, train an AI, decipher scanned books, and spot bomb-components on airport X-rays.
Von Ahn has figured out how to get this labor – and tons of it – for free. But because it's so devilishly hard to make things fun, he's in a category by himself: No other researcher or company has successfully turned a collaborative project into a game. Two years ago, Bryan Russell, a graduate student at MIT, launched LabelMe, a project in which contributors draw outlines around objects in photos. The goal is to produce marked-up images that can be used to train visual- recognition software. Russell says he considered making it a game but ended up relying on the altruism of other researchers in his field. Boundary drawing is a tedious task, he says, and it's best performed by visual-recognition experts."We wanted high-quality labeling, and it's hard to get average people to do it well," Russell says. "I'm not sure you could make a game out of it."
(Image thumbnail ganked from a larger pic by Mike McGregor)
Update: Robin passes on this video of a Google tech talk that von Ahn gave on the subject.
