Topologies for combining the Internet of Things and Serious Games

Serious Games have been established over recent years as a means of utilising gaming for applications other than entertainment.With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, a new direction for serious games arises, where data gathered from the physical environment can be utilised towards new novel applications. This literature survey uncovers existing topologies that can be applied for combining IoT with Serious Games. This paper presents findings from extensive research into IoT, Serious Games, Pervasive Games and Gamification, IoT topologies and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), to identify the requirements of a topology for Serious Games and IoT. By understanding the topological requirements for combining IoT and Serious Games, the development process is reduced, allowing for the advancement in the mentioned field. Three topologies are presented for combining IoT with Serious Games and a detailed topology for developing a Serious Game that monitors student attendance is presented. Also included, is an insight into the new paradigm of Smart Serious Games (SSGs). This paper will aid future research and development in SSGs determine effective network topologies

Born Digital / Grown Digital: Assessing the Future Competitiveness of the EU Video Games Software Industry

This report reflects the findings of the JRC-IPTS study on the Video games Industry, with a focus on two specific activities: online and mobile video games. The report starts by introducing the technologies, their characteristics, market diffusion and barriers to take up, and their potential economic impact, before moving to an analysis of their contribution to the competitiveness of the European ICT industry. The research is based on internal and external expertise, literature reviews and desk research, several workshops and syntheses of the current state of the knowledge. The results were reviewed by experts and in dedicated workshops. The report concludes that the general expectations for the next years foresee a speeded up migration of contents and services to digital, in a scenario of rapidly increasing convergence of digital technologies and integration of media services taking advantage of improved and permanent network connections. The role of the so-called creative content industry is expected to increase accordingly. Communication services and media industry will co-evolve on the playground of the Internet of services, along with a product to service transformation of the software market in general. In this general context the Video games Software industry plays and is expected to play a major role. The games industry may become a major driver of the development of networks as it has been in the past for the development of computer hardware.JRC.DDG.J.4-Information Societ

Quality of experience driven control of interactive media stream parameters

In recent years, cloud computing has led to many new kinds of services. One of these popular services is cloud gaming, which provides the entire game experience to the users remotely from a server, but also other applications are provided in a similar manner. In this paper we focus on the option to render the application in the cloud, thereby delivering the graphical output of the application to the user as a video stream. In more general terms, an interactive media stream is set up over the network between the user's device and the cloud server. The main issue with this approach is situated at the network, that currently gives little guarantees on the quality of service in terms of parameters such as available bandwidth, latency or packet loss. However, for interactive media stream cases, the user is merely interested in the perceived quality, regardless of the underlaying network situation. In this paper, we present an adaptive control mechanism that optimizes the quality of experience for the use case of a race game, by trading off visual quality against frame rate in function of the available bandwidth. Practical experiments verify that QoE driven adaptation leads to improved user experience compared to systems solely taking network characteristics into account

The Industry and Policy Context for Digital Games for Empowerment and Inclusion:Market Analysis, Future Prospects and Key Challenges in Videogames, Serious Games and Gamification

The effective use of digital games for empowerment and social inclusion (DGEI) of people and communities at risk of exclusion will be shaped by, and may influence the development of a range of sectors that supply products, services, technology and research. The principal industries that would appear to be implicated are the 'videogames' industry, and an emerging 'serious games' industry. The videogames industry is an ecosystem of developers, publishers and other service providers drawn from the interactive media, software and broader ICT industry that services the mainstream leisure market in games, The 'serious games' industry is a rather fragmented and growing network of firms, users, research and policy makers from a variety of sectors. This emerging industry is are trying to develop knowledge, products, services and a market for the use of digital games, and products inspired by digital games, for a range of non-leisure applications. This report provides a summary of the state of play of these industries, their trajectories and the challenges they face. It also analyses the contribution they could make to exploiting digital games for empowerment and social inclusion. Finally, it explores existing policy towards activities in these industries and markets, and draws conclusions as to the future policy relevance of engaging with them to support innovation and uptake of effective digital game-based approaches to empowerment and social inclusion.JRC.J.3-Information Societ

Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion

Revamping Cloud Gaming with Distributed Engines

While cloud gaming has brought considerable advantages for its customers, from the point of view of cloud providers, multiple aspects related to infrastructure management still fall short of such kind of service. Indeed, differently from traditional cloud-ready applications, modern game engines are still based on monolithic software architectures. This aspect precludes the applicability of fine-grained resource management and service orchestration schemes, ultimately leading to poor cost-effectiveness. To mitigate these shortcomings, we propose a Cloud-Oriented Distributed Engine for Gaming (CODEG). Thanks to its distributed nature, CODEG is capable of fully exploiting the resource heterogeneity present in cloud data centers, while providing the possibility of spanning its service on multiple network layers up to the edge clouds

A survey on interactive games over mobile networks

open4noThe mobile revolution has brought us the possibility to enjoy our favorite applications anywhere and anytime. In this context, interactive games over mobile networks embody a fascinating case study both for their commercial success and for their technical challenges, thus, sparking interest and development. The current state of the art of interactive games over mobile networks is captured in this article. We discuss main requirements and analyze possible combinations of existing solutions to provide better support for highly interactive game sessions with mobile players.This work has been partially supported by the UniPD Web Squared and MIUR/PRIN ALTER_NET projects.openGerla, M.; Maggiorini, D.; Palazzi, C.E.; Bujari, A.Gerla, M.; Maggiorini, D.; Palazzi, C.E.; Bujari, A

Open software to innovation: the critical success factors of massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG) in China and Ireland.

This project investigates the factors leading to the success of China’s Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) market and gives an analysis of how Open source has contributed to these success factors. It then will look at how the use of open source is mirrored in Ireland’s market for example, the software sector to see if the same factors are apparent or there are indicators of these. Knowledge Management plays a very important role for fasten the innovation of Open source software development in China