Systems for Crowdsourcing and Collaboration in Existing Interfaces

Many existing computer interfaces have been designed for use by a single user. However, there are many situations in which users of these single-user interfaces can benefit from additional or complementary input to the interface from more people. We introduce four systems which allow for collaboration and crowdsourcing across a wide variety of single-user interfaces in popular use today: (i) Legion, a system which a system which allows end users to easily capture existing GUIs and outsource them for real-time control by the crowd; (ii) WeGame, a system that allows small groups to more flexibly and collaboratively operate existing single-player games; (iii) Automatic Function Definition, a system for integrating crowdsourced and collaborator-defined subroutines into existing software development interfaces; and (iv) Multiverse, a system that allows crowd algorithms to be applied to existing interfaces.