In this paper, we discuss the importance of gameplay as a valuable tool in citizen sensing initiatives aimed at enabling creative collaboration and civic engagement. We present a review of selected citizen science and civic technologies' projects highlighting an emerging culture of massive collaborative initiatives that make use of crowdsourcing, enabling users to voluntarily contribute their time, effort and resources towards scientific research and civic issues. Moreover, we discuss how these initiatives could benefit from the inclusion of gameplay in their interaction processes. For that matter, we present a gamified citizen sensing project we are devising for users to enter and retrieve information on commercially available food products which contain ingredients associated with an increased risk of cancer and other diseases. Through gameplay, we expect to crowdsource an open database of potentially unhealthy food products, raising awareness among consumers about the risks of certain artificial additives. Finally, we argue that the use of gamification processes can engage voluntary participation in initiatives aimed at citizenship -including those which demand complex and repetitive tasks for the collection of data -and call for a more ethical, critical, and meaningful use of these new potential technologies, and for greater awareness of our new civic responsibilities.
Due to emerging new technologies in the development of interactive 3D applications (eg games and virtual reality), stereoscopic visualization is becoming a common feature. However, this fact does not solve some problems (nausea and headaches -cybersickness) related with the generation of this type of visualization. Some parameters have to be carefully chosen to create a comfortable stereo view, for example, eye distance, zero parallax plane distance, and the treatment of partially clipped objects in negative parallax. This paper presents a technique based on a CubeMap structure to dynamically adjust stereo parameters during the usage of two virtual reality tools in multi-scale 3D scenarios.
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