Society of “citizen science through dancing”

Abstract

Citizen science is scientific research conducted by nonprofessional scientists. Game-based citizen science tools have contributed to accelerating recent science progress. They have been paid great attention because nonexperts can find new scientific facts. However, the approach mainly fascinates only hardcore gamers because finding new facts is too challenging for casual users and does not fascinate them for long periods. In this paper, we present Citizen Science through Dancing, where two casual users collaboratively find better protein-protein docking through their body actions. Then, we enhance the basic approach with a virtual reality platform named CollectiveEyes to present multiple persons’ eye views in a virtual space. CollectiveEyes offers a social watching functionality to Citizen Science through Dancing for more fascinating casual users. We also report the opportunities and pitfalls into our current approach.