Using Open Street Map for Content Creation in Location-Based Games

Location-based games have been around since 2000. In these games, players are required to move and interact with objects in the physical world. Players need to reach a set of targets by moving outdoors. The targets are real objects (amenities) like statues, restaurants, bridges and contain the name, location, and a representative image. The main challenge is finding content and creating games where there is playing interest. In this paper, we study the use of OpenStreetMap (OSM) for content creation. We study the availability of amenities in different regions and whether they contain sufficient metadata for generating targets. We found that even if the data within OSM itself lacks images; many amenities refer to external links like Wikipedia pages and individual websites, from which we can extract the desired content about 21% of the time. This approach outperforms previously studied methods including Web crawling, geotagged photo datasets, and photo-sharing services such as Flickr. However, OSM data is greatly underrepresented in Asian countries and good results are limited to urban and downtown areas.