October 05, 2015 / by attila / In projects

EVE Online & The Human Protein Atlas

EVE Online is the bigggest science-fiction themed MMOG created by the Icelandic company, CCP. It started 11 years ago, and since there has been continuously developed and CCP released many expansions. In EVE Online the players become capsuleers - spaceship pilots - who live, fight, trade, manufacture, die and got born again in the virtual EVE Universe of 7,800 solar systems.
It is a sandbox game, which means, that all the players are playing on the same server, and everything that happens in the EVE Universe, becomes part of the history of EVE.
EVE is a one of a kind gaming experience. CCP created a complex world, but the real experience is created by the players themselves. Players create in-game corporations, form fleets and alliances, forge political relationships, spy on each other and do endless creative activities which the game not only lets them to do, but encourages them to do so. This emergent side of the game is so strong that even the trailer of the game - released in 2014 - is based on re-created in-game events and features actual gameplay voice recordings.

For over the last year CCP and MMOS were working together to bring real life scientific research tasks to the game.

The first project that we chose was a classification problem of immunofluorescent images from the Human Protein Atlas. These beautiful images are a perfect match to a sci-fi environment. The task will be to find one or more locations in the cell where proteins are attached to it.
The problem is relatively simple, though our experience with testing the feature tells us, that sometimes to find the good answer really requires attention, learning and experience. For now here comes an image from the Human Protein Atlas and we hope that soon we can blog about the interface design plans. More to come at EVE Vegas!