Community Circles
A location-based mobile game from my Master's Thesis that turns urban planning into a participatory game. Citizens drop geo-referenced contributions (ideas, issues, opinions, polls) and watch communities grow around them.
The game works like this: Players of Community Circles drop geo-referenced contributions (ideas, issues, opinions, and polls) onto a map. Each contribution has an impact area that grows with engagement and can merge with neighbouring areas to form communities. Contributions also carry a lifetime, extended by ongoing activity. The long-term aim is to grow and sustain real communities.
The prototype is a functional hybrid mobile app paired with a backend server. The concept was evaluated through a game trial with real users; the screenshots below are taken from that build.
The clip below, written in Processing, illustrates the core dynamic: contributions appear, gain impact as activity collects, and merge into communities over time.
This work was carried out within the interdisciplinary research project b-Part in cooperation with the Telecommunications Research Center Vienna (FTW). A work-in-progress poster was presented at the CHI'14 conference in Toronto, Canada. The original project site is preserved at /archives/cc.b-part.eu/.