Play Game, help neural Science!

Most of you would have heard about the term gamification, whereby performing an action typically associated with real life has been quantified in some way whereby repeating said action will grant some sort of reward and/or score-keeping. Some of you developers may have heard of the Visual Studio 2010 add-on that awards the developer unlocks based on things that as including a GOTO command in his code, or coding on a Friday or Saturday evening.


Many simple games have been developed recently where the primary action of the game is colour matching and those developers and publishers have made fortunes selling these - think Guitar Hero or Bejeweled...


How about doing the same thing for science and medicine advancement? Some clever guys over at MIT are prototyping this method of gamification with mapping out the retinal structure of a mouse, where computer algorithms have started "colouring in" cells, but are not quite capable of properly analysing the images being presented to them, so the game is to help the computer mapping system finish its task by colouring in the sections that it cannot readily identified. You colour a bit in, the computer takes over and continues colouring in till it cannot, you bridge the gap, the computer takes over and so forth.


This is still a concept, hence why a mouse's retina was chosen instead of the more complex brain tissue, or even more complex humans' nerve tissue.


So instead of playing Freecell at work, or <hurk> Guitar Hero for recreational abilities, consider switching to Eyewire and playing for SCIENCE!


Thanks to Slashdot for the alert!

Article describing Eyewire, and of course, Eyewire itself