Mobile Virtual Environments in Pervasive Computing

Abstract

Recently, human computer interaction has shifted from traditional desktop computing to the pervasive computing paradigm where users are engaged with everywhere and anytime computing devices. Mobile virtual environments (MVEs) are an emerging research area that studies the deployment of virtual reality applications on mobile devices. MVEs present additional challenges to application developers due to the restricted resources of the mobile devices, in addition to issues that are specific to wireless computing, such as limited bandwidth, high error rate and handoff intervals. Moreover, adaptive resource allocation is a key issue in MVEs where user interactions affect system resources, which, in turn, affects the user's experience. Such interplay between the user and the system can be modelled using game theory. This chapter presents MVEs as a real-time interactive distributed system, and investigates the challenges in designing and developing a remote rendering prefetching application for mobile devices. Furthermore, we introduce game theory as a tool for modelling decision-making in MVEs by describing a game between the remote rendering server and the mobile client.