CONE Sutro Forest: A gift for bird watchers

CONE Sutro Forest, a new kind of online videogame launched today, is all set to take gaming to soaring heights. This extensive multi-player game is all about bird watching and the concept has been conceived at the University of California, Berkeley, and Texas A&M University.

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CONE is the short for Collaborative Observatories for Natural Environments. The project is the brainchild of Professors Ken Goldberg of UC Berkeley and Dezhen Song of Texas A&M. Players have to take photos of birds in the Sutro Forest at San Francisco with the aid of a remote-controlled robotic video camera, placed near the Sutro Forest. The player then has to classify the bird in the photo. The system waits till at least one more player classifies the bird into the same category. Points are rewarded on the basis of how rare the bird is.

According to Goldberg:

This is a new kind of massive multi-player online game. Rather than aiming a gun at virtual enemies, players aim a camera at live wild birds.

CONE Sutro Forest uses a collaborative control interface that allows dozens of people to simultaneously share remote control of the pan-tilt-zoom video camera. It introduces highly responsive algorithms that automatically compute the optimal camera viewpoint to satisfy dozens of simultaneous players, including experts and amateurs. We've also included a new relay server to make the video stream faster and more responsive, a database of images and biological information about the wild birds likely to be spotted in the Sutro Forest, and a scoring system that rewards users who find and identify unusual birds.

We're hoping it attracts a wide range of players, from young video gamers who have never tried birdwatching, to seniors who are seasoned birdwatchers. Initially, the gamers may be better at controlling the interface, and birdwatchers may be better at correctly classifying the birds. We're looking forward to seeing how things turn out.

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Song added:

We hope this project increases public awareness about how technology can help natural observation. This also brings people with a specific knowledge together effectively and efficiently.

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For complete information about the game including instructions you can visit the game site.

And for all those who want to play the game, Happy Bird watching!

Photo of birds: Game site

Via: Slashdot and UCBerkeley News