Spongelab wins international award!
Last week Spongelab got the fantastic news that we were selected for an Honourary Mention in the National Science Foundation’s Visualization Challenge 2011. Build-a-Body, our interactive anatomy game, took the award for its awesome, virtual educational experience and was hailed by Science Journal as “more like a lab project than a video game.”
You can read about the award here and play the game here.
In honour of this honourary award, we played through a bunch of our interactive peers. Here are some of our favourites:
Foldit was the highest profile entry on the list, so it’s first place win wasn’t a surprise. It allows players to genuinely contribute to scientific discoveries - and no where was this more evident than when they solved the structure of the HIV enzyme within three weeks - a riddle puzzling scientists since, well, the discovery of HIV itself! Foldit gets players to compete against each other by folding proteins and helping to design new protein structures that might actually cure diseases. It’s tougher than most games in that it requires a hefty portion of scientific knowledge to understand it - but has proven to be a revolutionary tool in the research world.
In Meta!Blast, players control a microscopic space shift that transverses a cell. Players must ensure that they don’t run out of fuel, which comes in the form of ATP. It’s an exciting, hands-on adventure that really gets you up-close and personal to cellular biology. It’s very immersive with lovely graphics and sound (headphones recommended), and full of educational information (as well as neat pop-up quizzes you’ll come across).
Powers of Minus Ten is a neat visual simulator that works like a hyper-powered microscope looking within a human hand. It’s a little limited in terms of interactivity, and scientific information is pretty sparse, but the visualizations are very cool looking and all based on real cell science. It’s also rendered very nicely in Unity web player and on iOS.
How did Build-a-Body stack up to its playable peers? Let us know your thoughts here in Tumblr or on Facebook and Twitter.
