Konversatorium on Thursday, April 25, 2013 - 10:00

Current satellite-derived land cover products, which are very important for answering many crucial questions, show huge disagreements. In this paper, we introduce four serious game prototypes { a Facebook strategy game played on Google Maps, a Facebook tagging game, a tower-defense game, and an aesthetic tile game for the iPad { with the purpose of improving global land cover data. We describe the games in detail and discuss the design decisions we made and challenges we faced while developing the games. We evaluate how much the players have already been able to improve global land cover data and provide evidence that games can be a useful way to increase the quality of this data. Finally, we discuss how the main game is being perceived by the players and what has to be further improved to attract a bigger audience. 

This paper presents a parallel, implementation-friendly analytic visibility method for triangular meshes. Together with an analytic filter convolution, it allows for a fully analytic solution to anti-aliased 3D mesh rendering on parallel hardware. Building on recent works in computational geometry, we present a new edge-triangle intersection algorithm and a novel method to complete the boundaries of all visible triangle regions after a hidden line elimination step. All stages of the method are embarrassingly parallel and easily implementable on parallel hardware. A GPU implementation is discussed and performance characteristics of the method are shown and compared to traditional sampling-based rendering methods.