America
Video games without guzzling gigabytes soon
London, May 21
Gamers might one day be able to
enjoy the same graphics-intensive fast-action video games they play on
their mobile devices without guzzling gigabytes -- thanks to a new tool
developed by US researchers.
Named "Kahawai" after the Hawaiian
word for stream, the tool delivers graphics and gameplay on par with
conventional cloud-gaming setups for a fraction of the bandwidth, said
the researchers from Duke University and Microsoft Research.
"That
is a huge win, especially if your cellphone plan has a data cap," said
one of the researchers Landon Cox from Duke University.
"You will be able to play a lot longer," Cox added.
Similar
to video streaming services like Netflix, cloud gaming lets gamers
stream high-end video games from the Web anywhere, any time, on any
device. Under cloud gaming, it doesn't matter whether a smartphone or
tablet meets the game's minimum system requirements.
Cloud gaming
has its drawbacks, though. For one, transmitting high-resolution
graphics and audio fast enough for smooth gameplay can eat up a lot of
data quickly.
To reduce the amount of data that remote servers
have to send during a game, the new technology relies on a technique
called "collaborative rendering".
The researchers integrated
Kahawai into the software behind Doom 3, a futuristic first-person
shooter game about a space marine struggling to stay alive on Mars.
Compared with conventional cloud gaming setups, Kahawai delivered the
same visual quality while using one-sixth of the bandwidth.
The
researchers presented the new technology recently at the 13th
International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services
(MobiSys) in Florence, Italy.