Gamified Location Tracking for Exploration Incentives
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing location-based services primarily encourage travel to densely populated or up-and-coming areas, failing to incentivize users to explore outside their normal locations, which limits the diversity of travel experiences and rewards.
Innovation Solution
A system that tracks users' physical locations to create a heat map of their common presence areas, awarding points and rewards for traveling to less frequently visited, distant, or exotic locations, with dynamic scoring that degrades over time if exploration ceases, and publicly showcases scores through social media.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If location-based services reward users for visiting popular venues, then user engagement with the service is improved, but users are discouraged from exploring distant or less-known locations
Solution Approach 1:
The patent inverts the conventional reward approach by giving points for visiting locations that are far from a user's normal haunts rather than for visiting popular venues. This inversion directly addresses the contradiction by encouraging exploration of distant locations while still maintaining user engagement through the gamified scoring system.
Solution Approach 2:
The system dynamically changes the reward parameters based on a user's historical location data. By calculating distances from normal haunts and adjusting point values accordingly, the system adapts to each user's behavior patterns and encourages them to explore progressively farther locations, thereby increasing travel diversity while maintaining engagement.
2Measurement precision
If the system tracks user location continuously to create heat maps, then exploration scoring accuracy is improved, but user privacy concerns increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system processes location data locally on the user's device to create heat maps and calculate exploration scores, rather than continuously transmitting raw location data to remote servers. This local processing approach maintains measurement precision for scoring accuracy while minimizing privacy concerns by keeping sensitive location information on the user's device.
Solution Approach 2:
The system pre-calculates exploration scores and generates heat maps based on historical location data before needing to report to the server. This preliminary action allows the system to maintain accurate exploration scoring while reducing the frequency and volume of location data transmitted to external servers, thereby addressing privacy concerns.
Data Source
AI summary
Exploration outside of a person's normal area may be detected and rewarded. In one example, a game (or other type of application) may be built around such exploration. A device carried by a user (pursuant to appropriate permission obtained from the user) may report the user's location to a presence detector. The presence detector may use this information to build a heat map, indicating the user's areas of common presence. When the location information received from the device indicates that the user has ventured outside of the user's area of common presence, this exploration event may be rewarded with an increase in the user's score. The user's score may be published on social media.