As a result of the Healthy Cities seminar, some GEOTEC members applied the knowledge acquired about environmental monitoring, volunteered geographic information (VGI), gamification techniques, and Android programming, to develop a game prototype called NoiseQuest. This game is aimed to gather VGI that would raise the number of incentives, users, measurements and coverage areas to increase the amount of noise data through gamification techniques.

NoiseQuest is a prototype of the mobile application for Android platform that, by using quests, challenges and missions will guide a user around a city taking noise samples by following a storyline. The quests are focused on conquering different POIs by taking samples, and competing with the different users playing the game and progressing in the story.

The general idea of this application is to obtain noise measurements distributed uniformly around the city throughout time. For this purpose, the application will guide the user over all of the city’s area following a storyline where he or she is the main character. This game has different levels of difficulty so quests will be easier at the very beginning of the game and will get harder as long as the player advances in the game. The game starts in the user position and taking this point as a center it draws three concentric circles with a determined radius whose size depends on the selected level: the higher the level, the bigger the circles are and therefore, the general difficulty of the game increases until covering the entire city area. First quests consist in obtaining measurements in the user’s surroundings, located in the most inner circle. As long as the user completes the quests, the missions and challenges will lead the user to positions farther away, in the outer circles.
 

Some images depicting NoiseQuest game prototype.