Category: camouflage
-
Egg camouflage evolution tests in different nest sites
I’ve spent some time testing Project Nightjar EggLab: clicking on algorithmically generated eggs on backgrounds taken from nightjar nest sites and recording the time it takes for each egg. It’s designed for lots of people to play in parallel, but I wanted to test it before coming up with more gameplay mechanic ideas. The timing…
-
Project Nightjar: Camouflage data visualisation and possible internet robot predators
We’ve had tens of thousands of people spotting nightjars and donating a bit of their time to sensory ecology research. The results of this (of course it’s still on-going, along with the new nest spotting game) is a 20Mb database with hundreds of thousands of clicks recorded. One of the things we were interested in…
-
Project Nightjar: Where is that nest?
We’ve released a new game for Project Nightjar called Where is that nest? This is an adaptation of Where is that nightjar?, but the variety of species of birds is greater, some of the nests are much harder to find than the birds were so we added two levels – and a hall of fame…
-
Visualising egg pattern genomes
A couple of screenshots from the upcoming Project Nightjar citizen science game – the genetic programming pattern generator is now working in a simple test framework, and even with myself as the only player at the moment, it’s gradually producing eggs that are harder and harder to find against one of the background images from…
-
More procedurally rendered eggs in HTML5 canvas
The first Project Nightjar game was a big success, with 6 thousand players in the first few days – so we’ll have lots of visual perception data to get through! Today I’ve been doing a bit more work on the egg generator for the next citizen science camouflage game: I’ve made 24 new, more naturalistic…
-
Where is that nightjar?
The first Project Nightjar game is online! It’s a perception test to see how good you are at spotting the camouflaged birds – a great use of the photos the researchers are collecting in the field, and we can also use the data as an experiment by comparing our timing when searching for birds with…
-
Genetic programming egg patterns in HTML5 canvas
Part of the ‘Project Nightjar’ camouflage work I’m doing for the Sensory Ecology group at Exeter University is to design citizen science games we can build to do some research. One plan is to create lots of patterns in the browser that we can run perceptual models on for different predator animals, and use an…
-
Project Nightjar and responsive web design
Responsive web design is about how to deal with the multitude of different shaped screens that people are now using. Although it has some interesting technological aspects, it’s the philosophy that I find appealing – the idea of designing for the smallest and most limited form first, and then looking at how it can be…
-
Nightjar camouflage project: paper planning
It’s great to settle down to a few days of drawing and planning on paper for the Nightjar camouflage project I’m working on with the sensory ecology and evolution group. First things first, exploring the data, identifying potential groups of people who will find it useful and exciting, working out ways to bring it to…