Serious Game Evaluation as a Meta-game

Purpose – This paper aims to briefly outline the seamless evaluation approach and its application during an evaluation of ORIENT, a serious game aimed at young adults. Design/methodology/approach – In this paper, the authors detail a unobtrusive, embedded evaluation approach that occurs within the game context, adding value and entertainment to the player experience whilst accumulating useful data for the development team. Findings – The key result from this study was that during the “seamless evaluation” approach, users were unaware that they had been participating in an evaluation, with instruments enhancing rather than detracting from the in-role game experience. Practical implications – This approach, seamless evaluation, was devised in response to player expectations, perspectives and requirements, recognising that in the evaluation of games the whole process of interaction including its evaluation must be enjoyable and fun for the user. Originality/value – Through using seamless evaluation, the authors created an evaluation completely embedded within the “magic circle” of an in-game experience that added value to the user experience whilst also yielding relevant results for the development team

Discovering Earth’s transient moons with the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope

Earth’s temporarily-captured orbiters (TCOs) are a sub-population of near-Earth objects (NEOs). TCOs can provide constraints for NEO population models in the 1–10-metre-diameter range, and they are outstanding targets for in situ exploration of asteroids due to a low requirement on Δv. So far there has only been a single serendipitous discovery of a TCO. Here we assess in detail the possibility of their discovery with the upcoming Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), previously identified as the primary facility for such discoveries. We simulated observations of TCOs by combining a synthetic TCO population with an LSST survey simulation. We then assessed the detection rates, detection linking and orbit computation, and sources for confusion. Typical velocities of detectable TCOs will range from 1∘/day to 50∘/day, and typical apparent V magnitudes from 21 to 23. Potentially-hazardous asteroids have observational characteristics similar to TCOs, but the two populations can be distinguished based on their orbits with LSST data alone. We predict that a TCO can be discovered once every year with the baseline moving-object processing system (MOPS). The rate can be increased to one TCO discovery every two months if tools complementary to the baseline MOPS are developed for the specific purpose of discovering these objects.Peer reviewe

LSST Survey Strategies and Brown Dwarf Parallaxes

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) has the potential to measure parallaxes for thousands of nearby ultracool dwarfs, enabling improved measurements of the brown dwarf luminosity function. We develop a simple model to estimate the number of L dwarfs and T dwarfs with parallaxes with signal-to-noise ratio greater than ten in the baseline LSST survey. High quality astrometry imposes scheduling constraints. We assess different possible observing strategies using quantitative metrics and make recommendations as part of the LSST community input process. We find that the new substellar parallax sample will represent a nearly order-of-magnitude increase on existing samples, with ~50-100 objects per spectral type bin for late-L to mid-T dwarfs. The sample size is robust (+/- 5%) against most survey strategy changes under consideration, although we do identify areas of tension with other uses of twilight time that could have larger impact.Comment: Accepted to the Astrophysical Journal Supplement, for special issue on Rubin LSST Science Optimization. https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/0067-0049/page/rubin_cadenc

Testing LSST dither strategies for Survey Uniformity and Large-Scale Structure Systematics

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will survey the southern sky from 2022{2032 with unprecedented detail. Since the observing strategy can lead to artifacts in the data, we investigate the eects of telescope-pointing osets (called dithers) on the r-band coadded 5 depth yielded after the 10-year survey. We analyze this survey depth for several geometric patterns of dithers (e.g.,random, hexagonal lattice, spiral) with amplitude as large as the radius of the LSST eld-of-view, implemented on dierent timescales (per season, per night, per visit). Our results illustrate that per night and per visit dither assignments are more eective than per season. Also, we find that some dither geometries (e.g., hexagonal lattice) are particularly sensitive to the timescale on whichthe dithers are implemented, while others like random dithers perform well on all timescales. We then model the propagation of depth variations to articial uctuations in galaxy counts, which are a systematic for large-scale structure studies. We calculate the bias in galaxy counts caused by the observing strategy, accounting for photometric calibration uncertainties, dust extinction, and magnitude cuts; uncertainties in this bias limit our ability to account for structure induced by the observing strategy. We nd that after 10 years of the LSST survey, the best dither strategies lead to uncertainties in this bias smaller than the minimum statistical floor for a galaxy catalog as deep asr<27.5. A few of these strategies bring the uncertainties close to the statistical floor for r<25.7 after only one year of survey.Fil: Awan, Humna. Rutgers University; Estados UnidosFil: Gawiser, Eric. Rutgers University; Estados UnidosFil: Kurczynski, Peter. Rutgers University; Estados UnidosFil: Lynne Jones, R.. University of Washington; Estados UnidosFil: Zhan, Hu. Chinese Academy of Sciences; República de ChinaFil: Padilla, Nelson David. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile; ChileFil: Muñoz Arancibia, Alejandra M.. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile; ChileFil: Orsi, Alvaro. Centro de Estudios de Fisica del Cosmos de Aragon; EspañaFil: Cora, Sofia Alejandra. Universidad Nacional de la Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Astronómicas y Geofísicas; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Instituto de Astrofísica La Plata. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Astronómicas y Geofísicas. Instituto de Astrofísica la Plata; ArgentinaFil: Yoachim, Peter. University of Washington; Estados Unido