After participating in the Healthy Cities seminar, some GEOTEC members developed a prototype of a gamified mobile application to monitor noise pollution in cities. For this purpose it was necessary to apply the concepts learnt in the seminar, such as: Gamification techniques, crowdsourcing data (VGI) or environmental monitoring.

Noise Battle is a gamified mobile application developed for the Android platform, where users have to move around a city taking noise samples through the smartphone speaker. The final goal of this game from the user’s point of view is conquering the city by taking noise measurements.

The city is split into cells of a grid, so the user can conquer the cells by taking more and better measurements than other users in the area. During the game, users are rewarded by different means: either by measuring in the proximity of one of the rewards placed in the grid or by conquering some cell within it. Rewards might include the possibility of sending noises or sounds to foes, in order to show rivals the power obtained after playing in the game. The rivals have the option of re-conquering previously conquered cells by performing better quality or more recent measurements.

This work was presented last 26th September in the 3rd Conference on Serious Games Development and applications (SGDA), a satellite conference to the 11th International Conference on Entertainment Computing (ICEC) in Bremen, Germany.

Some images depicting NoiseBattle game prototype.