Identification of structural landmarks in a park using movement data collected in a location-based game

The goal of this paper is to investigate the possibility to identify structural landmarks using movement data collected during an event of a location-based game. Landmarks are visually, structurally or cognitively salient, spatial features used for example for navigation purposes to situate and to orientate oneself within the own world and to locate proximate or distant objects or locations within this space. Structural salience is a characteristic of a landmark defined by the prominence of its spatial position. We use relations between movement and landmarks in order to reason about the structural significance of locations in a city park, based on the movement behavior exhibited by the players of the location-based game called Ostereiersuche. The results of this study suggest that structurally salient landmarks can be identified based on an analysis of movement events recorded in a location-based game. The introduced "player movement - landmark detection loop" represents a first instance of a landmark management system as one layer of a mobile game play ecosystem, the mobile game lab.