AHP-based Adaptive Resource Selection for Cognitive Platform in Cloud Gaming Service

Cloud gaming service enables offloading heavy video-processing tasks up to the cloud server so that simple computers or mobile devices can be eligible to run sophisticated games, but on the expense of high network communications. In this regard, the adequate network utilization must be realized for delivering good gaming experiences to the game players. This necessitates a cognitive platform, which is capable of modifying its multimedia quality requirement in response to the network constraint, and notifying the cloud gaming server for updating the corresponded workload. In this regard, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method has been proposed to deploy at the cognitive platform for cloud gaming service to select an optimal resource allocation strategy that satisfies various multimedia requirements and energy-awareness. Experiment results can confirm that the proposed method is flexible to enhance the capability of cloud gaming service in term of more efficient cloud gaming resource utilization, particularly during heavy-congested periods, while players’ quality of gaming experience can be still maintained under the mandate of intelligent agent on the player devices

A network analysis on cloud gaming: Stadia, GeForce Now and PSNow

Cloud gaming is a new class of services that promises to revolutionize the videogame market. It allows the user to play a videogame with basic equipment while using a remote server for the actual execution. The multimedia content is streamed through the network from the server to the user. This service requires low latency and a large bandwidth to work properly with low response time and high-definition video. Three of the leading tech companies, (Google, Sony and NVIDIA) entered this market with their own products, and others, like Microsoft and Amazon, are planning to launch their own platforms in the near future. However, these companies released so far little information about their cloud gaming operation and how they utilize the network. In this work, we study these new cloud gaming services from the network point of view. We collect more than 200 packet traces under different application settings and network conditions for 3 cloud gaming services, namely Stadia from Google, GeForce Now from NVIDIA and PS Now from Sony. We analyze the employed protocols and the workload they impose on the network. We find that GeForce Now and Stadia use the RTP protocol to stream the multimedia content, with the latter relying on the standard WebRTC APIs. They result in bandwidth-hungry and consume up to 45 Mbit/s, depending on the network and video quality. PS Now instead uses only undocumented protocols and never exceeds 13 Mbit/s

Point cloud data compression

The rapid growth in the popularity of Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Mixed Reality (MR) experiences have resulted in an exponential surge of three-dimensional data. Point clouds have emerged as a commonly employed representation for capturing and visualizing three-dimensional data in these environments. Consequently, there has been a substantial research effort dedicated to developing efficient compression algorithms for point cloud data. This Master's thesis aims to investigate the current state-of-the-art lossless point cloud geometry compression techniques, explore some of these techniques in more detail and then propose improvements and/or extensions to enhance them and provide directions for future work on this topic

Platforming Gamification as a Means of Engagement in Employee Recruitment and Onboarding

Gamification, generally understood as the application of game elements and design concepts in non-game contexts, is a field of academic study and multibillion-dollar business tool whose popularity is growing as a means of employee engagement, education and training, and talent selection. While there are companies that attempt to gamify separate processes within the employee life cycle, no company exists that gamifies the stages surrounding talent selection: attraction and recruitment of applicants and onboarding of final candidates. To this end, this thesis proposes a software and consulting company, GameON Business Solutions, that will work with small and medium enterprises to expand and diversify the talent pool and prepare new employees for working at the company

A Serious Games Development Environment

Un ambiente per lo sviluppo di Serious Game