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Cloud Gaming with Foveated Video Encoding

Published: 17 February 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Cloud gaming enables playing high-end games, originally designed for PC or game console setups, on low-end devices such as netbooks and smartphones, by offloading graphics rendering to GPU-powered cloud servers. However, transmitting the high-resolution video requires a large amount of network bandwidth, even though it is a compressed video stream. Foveated video encoding (FVE) reduces the bandwidth requirement by taking advantage of the non-uniform acuity of human visual system and by knowing where the user is looking. Based on a consumer-grade real-time eye tracker and an open source cloud gaming platform, we provide a cloud gaming FVE prototype that is game-agnostic and requires no modifications to the underlying game engine. In this article, we describe the prototype and its evaluation through measurements with representative games from different genres to understand the effect of parametrization of the FVE scheme on bandwidth requirements and to understand its feasibility from the latency perspective. We also present results from a user study on first-person shooter games. The results suggest that it is possible to find a “sweet spot” for the encoding parameters so the users hardly notice the presence of foveated encoding but at the same time the scheme yields most of the achievable bandwidth savings.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications
ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications  Volume 16, Issue 1
February 2020
363 pages
ISSN:1551-6857
EISSN:1551-6865
DOI:10.1145/3384216
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 17 February 2020
Accepted: 01 October 2019
Revised: 01 June 2019
Received: 01 August 2018
Published in TOMM Volume 16, Issue 1

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Author Tags

  1. Cloud gaming
  2. adaptive bitrate encoding
  3. foveated video encoding
  4. game streaming
  5. gaze-contingent encoding

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  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed

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  • Nokia Center for Advanced Research
  • European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme
  • Academy of Finland

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