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Verizon

Verizon’s Apophis 2029 mobile game seeks to save Earth from killer asteroids

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By John Glenday, Reporter

July 6, 2015 | 2 min read

US telecoms giant Verizon has announced it is to develop a branded mobile app designed to gamify the process of classifying near Earth objects, a vital task as astronomers survey the skies for potentially killer asteroids.

Unveiled at Cannes Lions Apophis 2029 relies on the uncanny ability of humans to classify objects (even asteroids) with far greater accuracy than super computers, helping NASA scientists to complete the laborious process of figuring out what each object is made of.

The crowd-sourced initiative involves signing up human players to demonstrate their pattern recognition prowess, if sufficient numbers of players agree on the classification of specific objects the information will be duly submitted to NASA vi Verizon’s cloud servers.

Francesca DeMeo, an asteroid researcher at MIT who helped deliver the project, said: “Crowdsourcing, of course, has been done before in science. What's unique about what we're trying to do here is use the science aspect—the crowdsourcing and public input—and combine that with a game. So, it becomes more than just a homework assignment. This is play with an exciting scientific twist to it."

Anyone interested in saving the world will be able to get their hands on the title this autumn.

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