Using Open Street Map for Content Creation in Location-Based Games

Abstract

Location-based games have been around since 2000. In these games, players are required to move and interact with objects in the physical world. Players need to reach a set of targets by moving outdoors. The targets are real objects (amenities) like statues, restaurants, bridges and contain the name, location and a representative image. The main challenge is finding content and creating games where there is playing interest. In this paper, we study the usefulness of OpenStreetMap (OSM) for content-creation. We study the availability of amenities in different regions and whether they contain sufficient metadata for generating targets. We found that even if the data within OSM itself lacks images; many amenities refer to external links like Wikipedia pages and individual websites, from which we can extract the desired content about 21% of the time. This approach outperforms previously studied methods including Web crawling, geotagged photo datasets, and photo-sharing services such as Flickr. However, OSM data is greatly underrepresented in Asian countries and good results are limited to urban and downtown areas.

Keywords

• location-based games
• content creation
• open street map