Cloud Gaming With Foveated Video Encoding

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.
We have designed and implemented a system for cloud gaming with foveated encoding using a consumer grade real-time eye tracker and an open source cloud gaming platform. In this article, we describe the system and its evaluation through measurements with representative games from different genres to understand the effect of parameterization of the FVE scheme on bandwidth requirements and to understand its feasibility from the latency perspective.
We also present results from a user study. The results suggest that it is possible to find a "sweet spot" for the encoding parameters so that the users hardly notice the presence of foveated encoding but at the same time the scheme yields most of the bandwidth savings achievable.