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A concept game aims to transform humans into ants as part of the first MMO designed for Google Glass.

Swarm! casts Glass wearers as members of an ant colony who complete tasks while they go about their daily lives. Designed by Daniel Estrada, a philosophy professor at Illinois State University, and Jonathan Lawhead of Columbia University,


Swarm! grew out of a fusion of the pair's academic and gaming interests.

The game begins as you leave your house in the morning wearing Glass, according to the extensive rule manual that Estrada and Lawhead have already compiled.

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Using GPS data collected by Glass, the game generates a record of each player's daily routine. The trails are then mapped out in the colour of the player's colony and colonies work together to collect resources. "Swarm! gives everyone biologically-inspired ant superpowers for addressing resource management problems that all organisms face," Lawhead told Wired.co.uk. "Ants lay down trails that signal to all the other ants some key features of their activity, so each ant can use that information for themselves to decide how to act. Swarm! lays down a digital trails that represent features of the local environment that are significant to Swarm! players."

Reinforcing trails already created by others in the same colony can boost the resource collection rate, but crossing paths with rival colonies could result in the loss of resources. In-game bonuses will be triggered by ants that spend longer in one place or add pictures to the trails. Players can determine their own level of engagement throughout the day and interactions with other ants or in-game objects will be recorded automatically. "Individual users can run Swarm! in the background and meaningfully contribute to populating the Swarm! model, without ever having to be bothered by the actual game at all," says Lawhead.


Ants are dumb; ant colonies are smart. The intelligence of ant behavior emerges from how the ants interact with one another, not from the intelligence of the ants themselves

The idea for the game originally came about when Lawhead and Estrada were trying to come up with an app proposal for Google Glass. "We're both very interested in complex systems and self-organisation, and we both have some experience playing games," says Lawhead. "Ants are a natural model of self-organisation. Ants are dumb; ant colonies are smart. The intelligence of ant behavior emerges from how the ants interact with one another, not from the intelligence of the ants themselves. That's a tantalising example, because it suggests that problems that can't be solved by individuals (for instance problems about how to allocate resources across really large communities) might be solved in other ways."

Swarm! players are encouraged to collectively identify, tag and document points of interest as they travel around, thereby gamifiying the crowdsourcing of information about their neighbourhoods and other public spaces. The data collected from the game could easily facilitate mapping of public areas -- the power points in an airport, for example.

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Studying the patterns of human behaviour documented by

Swarm! in situations where information was otherwise difficult to collect could also help improve and maximise efficient allocation of resources, says Lawhead, giving the example of an urban planner in New York. "Suppose you need to figure out how to optimise the sequence of traffic light changes and the subway schedule to optimise traffic flow in the evening, while making sure that there are as few trains and street intersections as possible going unused at any give time."

You would need to collect all sorts of information about the population shifts at certain times of the day and week and what other factors affected that, which would be nearly impossible and produce skewed results due to the relying on people to voluntarily report their behaviour, says Lawhead.


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"It would be far more efficient if you could harvest the information you need without requiring that people go out of their way to give it to you. This need not be an invasion of privacy, as you're interested in general patterns of use, rather than the specific behaviors of any individual. If you could examine all the pictures, tags, check-ins, and other interaction data coming out of downtown NYC at a given time, you'd be well on your way to already having your job done for you. "Glass really does free up both your hands and your visual field, which are two of the most important biological resources your body has to offer," says Lawhead. "That expands the range of tasks you can think of yourself as being able to easily accomplish, which makes you a smarter system overall. Wearing something like Glass makes you capable of contributing to the solution of problems that you might never have been able to touch before -- both because your hands are free and because your brain is free."

Swarm! was one of the concepts that impressed the Google team, allowing the Lawhead and Estrada to become Glass Explorers. They are currently hoping to hear from people who want to contribute code or art to the project, and are also looking for financial contributions to cover the cost of the Glass unit and to fund the development of the game.