Motion chain: a webcam game for crowdsourcing gesture collection

This paper describes the development and preliminary design of a game with a purpose that attempts to build a corpus of useful and original videos of human motion. This content is intended for use in applications of machine learning and computer vision. The game, Motion Chain, encourages users to respond to text and video prompts by recording videos with a web camera. The game seeks to entertain not through an explicit achievement or point system but through the fun of performance and the discovery inherent in observing other players. This paper describes two specific forms of the game, Chains and Charades, and proposes future possibilities. The paper describes the phases of game design as well as implementation details then discusses an approach for evaluating the game's effectiveness.