Reading #24: Games for Sketch Data Collection (Johnson)

Comments:
Kim
Summary:
The paper presents two games for sketch data collection. One is a asynchronous game called Picturephone, the other is a synchronous game called Stellasketch.  Both these two games are web-based, and need a lot of users to participate.

Picturephone collects long sentences that describe sketches. Each user is randomly assigned to one of three modes (draw, describe and rate). In draw mode, users draw a sketch based on the description. In describe mode, users describe the sketch. In rate mode, users give a score to each pair of sketches.

Stellasketch gathers short noun-phrase that label sketches as they are made. Each round, one user draw a sketch based on the nouns, and other users describe the sketch by noun-phrase. Each person doesn't know other's job.

Discussion:
These two games are only used to collect users' sketches. The ideas of these two games are really good, because it captures data when people are entertaining. They are a good application of human-computer interaction.

However, as the author says, there are still some difficulties on how to use these sketches. Some data is with much noise, some data is with extra strokes, and some data even is consisted of unrelated sketch. The quality of data cannot be guaranteed. Also, how to use these data to train recognizers is also very hard.

I appreciate the idea of collecting data by games, but I don't think there is much more adavantages than the normal method, such as user study.