Editor’s note: Kevin Raposo is a tech blogger who writes for KnowTechie,
which he launched. When he’s not catching up on all the latest startups
budding out of the Boston tech scene, he’s holding his post down as a
media relations manager at EZPR.
Thanks to a little startup sprouting up from Boston, I was able to map out a small section of a neuron through EyeWire, a company that’s gamifying its neuroscience research in order to enlist the help of people from all over the world.
To understand how the brain works, scientists need to
figure out how electrical impulses travel through its vast network of 85
billion neurons, connected through 100 trillion synapses. And to do
this, they need to map the structure and connections of all these
neurons. Enter EyeWire, a company that’s crowdsourcing this mapping
process with a fun and addictive online game.
“I think that exploring the brain is the greatest adventure
of all time. It seemed natural to invite the world to join the quest,”
says EyeWire’s founder, Sebastian Seung.
The Game
The game essentially works like a 3D puzzle. Players are
tasked with the challenge of mapping the structure and connections of
neurons by isolating individual cells from large three-dimensional
microscopic image datasets. Think of it like a coloring book.
Remember how as a kid you were always taught to color
within the lines? This is pretty much the same, but instead, players are
tasked with the assignment of mapping out neurons from one side of a cube to the other, by scrolling up and down through the cube and rebuilding neurons in segments.
These cubes are the width of an average human hair (about
4.5 microns per side, technically speaking). Once players successfully
fill in all the blanks, a visual 3D shape of the cell they just mapped
is displayed.
If it sounds complex, it isn’t; it’s designed so anyone can
play. EyeWire’s executive director, Amy Robinson, tells me its users
are ”high school students, grandmothers, tugboat drivers, animators,
everything. It’s amazing because hardly any of them have any neuroscience background, but yet they’re helping to make discoveries on how the brain works.”
To remind users that they are indeed playing a game,
EyeWire provides a typical gaming experience. It features an elaborate
profile system, achievement badges, special icons, a chat feature that
allows you to interact with other players, and the capacity to unlock
additional privileges as you level up through the game. It’s no surprise
that the game currently has about 180,000 users. “The top players are
actually online for 30, 40, 50 hours a week,” Robinson adds.
EyeWire is already looking ahead when it comes to
integrating improvements into the gaming experience. Robinson notes,
“we’re working now to create a lot of interesting visuals, educational
material, all sets built around a mobile game, and think about how
future games will basically become more gamified and more fun.”
To step their game up to the next level, EyeWire sought the help of Indicated,
a company that develops interactive 3D software and media with a
medical focus, to develop an Oculus Rift version of the game. EyeWire
debuted the Oculus DK2 version of the game at the NIH Science in 3D
conference in January.
Developing the VR version of the game wasn’t easy, Indicated co-founder Matthew Irwin notes.
“To produce the Oculus experience, EyeWire sent us about 650GB of the research
data generated by their users. Individual neurons were identified and
encoded in this data, and we used that information to generate the
surface models that you see and experience. In this way, the neurons that you see
around you in virtual space were not modeled by an artist, but
correlate directly with the structures in the original source data.”
I was lucky enough to visit EyeWire’s office – which is based out of a WeWork space in Boston
– to try the game for myself. I was blown away. As soon as I strapped
myself into “the rift,” I was immersed in an environment that was filled
with highways of neurons sprawled out in every direction. It was
intense.
The VR experience incorporates a natural gaze-based
navigation method (which lets a user fly toward a particular area simply
by looking where they want to go). To add an educational element,
Indicated embedded a few trigger points in the environment that show
additional content such as educational videos, which appear as virtual
billboards hovering in front of the user. This was one of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had with the Oculus Rift.
The game was just recently launched on the Oculus download page, which can be found here.
API
To make things more interesting, EyeWire recently released an API in the hopes of transforming the game to a platform.
“First, we created the game. Now we’re inviting game
developers – really any developer – to build their own games to map the
brain. New mechanics, creative interfaces…things we never thought of.
Hopefully they will build games that are even more fun than EyeWire,”
Robinson adds.
The API consists of a sample app and an HTTP API used for
assigning players cubes and allowing them to submit them to a social
computing server. A sample app can be found here. It consists of a bare-bones web app that can be used as the nucleus of new game designs or alternative applications.
The HTTP API allows third parties to retrieve cubes and submit player neuron traces. One
of the developers who helped write the API, William Silversmith, tells
me, “In time, we hope to develop an ecosystem of various game designs,
and we will integrate the solutions they submit into the neural
consensus weighted with the appropriate level of confidence we will
acquire from continuously measuring submissions as compared to others
and compared to our QA process.”
Although EyeWire is continuously making revolutionary strides in the gamification of scientific research, it’s certainly not the only one doing it.
Foldit, a research
project out of the University of Washington Center for Game Science in
collaboration with the UW Department of Biochemistry, is a 3D puzzle
game that challenges users to fold proteins into the best possible
molecular structure. Players are judged on criteria, including size and
whether hydrophobic chains are surrounded by as many atoms as possible.
The game was launched in 2008 and has been played by approximately
400,000 people.
In Planet Four,
players are assigned the task of identifying and measuring features on
the surface of the southern polar region of Mars. If space exploration
isn’t your thing, TomNod
brings it closer to home. Instead of scouring the surface of Mars,
TomNod users crowdsource observations about the Earth’s surface. When
Malaysia Airlines flight 370 went missing, TomNod directed its users to
help search for the missing aircraft. In fact, the site couldn’t keep up
with the traffic due to an influx of users looking to help.
“Through games, though building better computer vision AI
and thus automating big neurodata analysis – our collective,
collaborative, even gamified competitive brainpower will be the key to
figuring [complex problems] out,” Robinson concludes.