Abstract: "Cloud gaming provides game-on-demand
(GoD) services over the Internet cloud. The goal is to
achieve faster response time and higher QoS. The
video game is rendered remotely on the game cloud
and decoded on thin client devices such as tablet
computer or smartphone. We design a game cloud with
a virtualized cluster of CPU/GPU servers at USC
GamePipe Laboratory. We enable interactive gaming
by taking full advantage of the cloud and local
resources for high quality of experience (QoE) gaming.
We report preliminary performance results on
the game latency and frame rate. We find 109 ~ 131 ms
latency in using the game cloud, which is 14% ~ 38%
lower than 200 ms latency experienced on a thin local
computer. Moreover, the frame rate from the cloud is
25% ~ 35% higher than that of using a client computer
alone. Base on these findings, we anticipate game
cloud to have a performance gain or QoS improvement
of 14% ~ 38% over video gaming on a thin client
device such as a smartphone or a tablet computer."
Abstract: "the boom
of Cloud Computing services in the recent years has created
new opportunities and removed many of the limitations that
are typically tied to software deployed on the Internet. It has
been shown that the development of online games can benefit
from the integration of Cloud services into their design in order
to solve many of the problems that plague their development
and maintenance. In this paper, we first discuss the current
designs of online gaming architectures and present their limits.
The solutions offered by using Cloud services in respect to these
video games are then explored and the new problems that arise
from this combination are addressed. We also present a case
study by deploying an online First Person Shooter multiplayer
video game on currently available Cloud infrastructures (using
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) and detailing our architecture
specifically designed for this purpose. We show that, where once
entering the market of online games was solely affordable by big
companies due to the high infrastructure costs, a single person
could now create and deploy an online game."
Abstract: "Cloud gaming now makes any computer game
playable on a thin client without the previous worries and
frustrations about the hardware requirements. It frees players
from the need to frequently upgrade their computers as they
can now play games that are hosted on remote servers with a
broadband Internet connection and a thin client. However, cloud
games are intrinsically more susceptible to latency than online
games because game graphics are rendered on cloud servers and
thin clients do not possess game state information that is required
by delay compensation techniques.
In this paper, we investigate how the response latency in cloud
gaming would affect users' experience and how the impact of
latency on players' experience varies among different games. We
show that not all games are equally friendly to cloud gaming. That
is, the same degree of latency may have very different impacts on
a game's quality of experience depending on the game's real-time
strictness. We thus develop a model that can predict a game's
real-time strictness based on the rate of players' inputs and the
game screen dynamics. The model can be used to simultaneously
enhance players' gaming and optimize the operation
cost of data centers."
Abstract: "Obesity has become an outstanding public health issue in most
countries around the world. Many attempts have been made to address
this issue that ranges from taking medication to doing exercise to follow-
ing a diet plan to playing games. Few approaches combine exercise and
game to engage the obese people in playing fun-based games or pur-
poseful games, also known as serious games, while monitoring their bio-
signals. However, existing work hardly provides a configurable, scalable
and context-aware serious game framework that can be used as a sup-
port for obesity treatment. In this paper, we take an attempt to propose
such a framework. The proposed framework facilitates bio-signal monitor-
ing based on body sensor network, context-awareness based on perva-
sive sensors, and on-the-spot activity recommendation based on current
game-playing context. It uses the cloud computing platform as infrastruc-
tural support that ensures the scalability of the framework. In order to
demonstrate the suitability of the proposed framework, we developed a
sample serious game; deploy it over a cloud platform; and experiment
with it by capturing some psycho-physical data while the obese are en-
gaged in game-play. We observed that the obese people were very much
engaged in game-play and they had positive experience using the system"
Abstract: "To improve
musical auditory habilitation for children post cochlear im-
plantation, we developed MOGAT: MObile Games with Au-
ditory Training. The system includes three musical games
built with o-the-shelf mobile devices to train their pitch
perception and intonation skills respectively, and a cloud-
based web service which allows music therapists to monitor
and design individual training for children. The design of the
games and web service was informed by a pilot survey (N=60
children). To ensure widespread use with low-cost mobile
devices, we minimized the computation load while retaining
highly accurate audio analysis. A 6-week user study (N=15
children) showed that the music habilitation with MOGAT
was intuitive, enjoyable and motivating. It has improved
most children's pitch discrimination and production, and
several children's improvement was statistically signicant
(p < 0:05)."