Sony’s experimental EvolutionUI brings gamification to your smartphone

Gamification is a buzz word that has been around for a while now and basically involves bringing game mechanics to non-game scenarios to drive greater engagement. It can include rewards for doing certain tasks such as unlocking achievements or badge levels. Sony has been experimenting with a new open-source user interface called EvolutionUI, which aims to bring these concepts to your phone.

The EvolutionUI project disables the more advanced features at the start, so for example when you first start the phone you will only have one homescreen, one clock widget, core applications and a locked layout so that users can’t remove apps by mistake. Then as the user gets comfortable, EvolutionUI will open up more and more features.

These features could include achievements for starting a number of different applications, which may allow you to edit shortcuts onto the homescreen. Experience points (XP) could also be earned by performing actions, which could be used to “level up”, similar to how you would in role-playing games.

To cater for the more advanced users, the EvolutionUI would use profiles across four levels (Beginner, Easy, Medium and Advanced). The latter would mean the whole phone would be open, but you could collect the achievements for fun anyway.

This is a user interface that becomes more advanced the more you learn how to use it. In that regard, we doubt it would appeal to any of our readers, but could be a very useful tool for those new to smartphones or Android in general.

Could you see something like this catching on? Would you use it or would it annoy you? We’ve love to hear your thoughts below.

Via Sony Mobile Developer.

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