Activity-centric streaming of virtual environments and games to mobile devices

As mobile devices still have limited battery, processing power, memory, and display size, compared to their PC counterparts, they cannot yet execute Virtual Environment (VE) and Online Gaming applications with the same fidelity and quality as their PC counterpart. In response, we have recently witnessed some research with the goal of real-time delivery of VE and multiplayer game content specifically to fit mobile devices´ limitations. In this paper, we present a novel approach to tackle the streaming of 3D objects for such environments. Our goal is to improve the real-time response and interactivity of networked VEs and games through an efficient context-aware 3D object selection and prioritization scheme, before streaming those objects over the network. In our architecture, we take advantage of game context for culling and streaming only the most relevant objects in each frame of gameplay and stream them from the server to a client. Our evaluations show that this technique not only leads to better performance in general, but also increases gameplay experience by helping the player to achieve a higher score in comparison with traditional approaches.