A Playful Tinder-Like Interface for Search and Rescue

This paper presents aeroSee, a web-based micro-volunteering platform that uses drone-captured imagery to support search and rescue efforts for missing persons in rural environments. Its central proposition is that a playful, Tinder-inspired swiping interface can motivate volunteers to sort and tag photos at scale, drawing on the authors' co-design work and prior research in gamification and citizen science. The paper traces the lineage of micro-volunteering and user-generated content, from Google's Image Labeler to phylogenetics and science-based crowdsourcing projects, and positions aeroSee within the shift from points-and-leaderboard gamification toward gameful and playful design.

The authors report that an earlier alpha trial, which used a points-based leaderboard to encourage textual tagging, produced no measurable gain in performance or tag quality. The platform was subsequently redesigned to remove points, rewards and leaderboards, shifting emphasis to interaction, story and community. The interface adopts Tinder's swiping mechanic to move quickly through large photo sets, with a no-going-back rule, but introduces two participation modes: a speedy mode for rapid tagging and an accuracy mode that supports zooming, panning and metadata inspection. This mirrors difficulty selection in games and accommodates volunteers who can offer only short periods of time.

The paper is a design-oriented contribution rather than an empirical evaluation, and it does not present survey sizes, performance metrics or user-study data for the redesigned interface. Its scope is limited to one feature of the platform, with community building, civic engagement and social dimensions identified as future work. The authors also flag ethical concerns about volunteers viewing potentially disturbing drone-captured content over which the platform has no control.