kallergi·a

researcher, teacher and a curious person...

Onto-Frogger (2010)

ontofrogger startontofrogger frames

keywords: graph, annotations, information visualization, executable visualization, scientific images, arcade games

Onto-Frogger is a single-player, arcade style game for scientific images, their annotations and the connections established by these annotations. Based on the classic arcade game Frogger (Konami Industry Co. Ltd, 1981), Onto-Frogger requires the player to reach a target image on the opposite bank of the river by jumping on floating image tiles and by collecting sufficient coins for the toll station on the opposite bank. To collect coins, the player needs to land on image tiles that share annotations with the target image: Every coin is an annotation term shared with the target.

Onto-Frogger was heavily influenced by the practices of information visualization and by an understanding of an image repository as a graph structure. A set of images together with their metadata can be easily abstracted into a graph: The nodes of this graph are the images while the edges between nodes can be derived by a number of measures, in our case, the presence of a common annotation between the two images. Onto-Frogger attempts to function as an ‘executable’
information visualization that materializes structure and existing connections by encoding them in their game logic. Onto-Frogger implements a way to literally play with images that exposes the users/players to the underlying structure of the data collection by challenging them to identify, predict and resolve existing connections for the needs of the game.

Read more:
My phD thesis chapter 3- Playing with images 1: Game-like interaction (pdf)
Related publications:
 
Related links:
Onto-Frogger was developed as part of my phD research on playful interfaces for scientific images.