Will Wireless Gaming Be a Winner? February 1, 2007 Sumit Rohit Thaker Sung Ho Hwang

Wireless gaming revenues In 2001 ▫US - $436.4 million ▫East Asia - $827 million By 2006 ▫Worldwide - $17.5 Billion ▫80% all mobile users will play games

Issues & Designed Difficulties Limited Memory Screen Resolution Network Bandwidth Will work on various handsets ▫Various screen size, color depths, APIs Controls are single key presses Need to develop new approaches & techniques

New Approach – “Swerve” Usage: ▫Download relatively small amounts of data ▫then use the processor & various algorithms to build the rest of the file Data Size ▫Single skill level on a standard game can take up less than 50Kbytes ▫Most Complex game rarely exceeds 100Kbytes. Typical game – 2Mbytes only

Tile based rendering Technique: ▫Partition a scene into small tiles, each of which can be rendered independently. ▫Most of the processing is done in the graphics core of the processor Advantage: ▫Can use simpler and more cost-effective memory technologies

Deferred Texturing Technique: ▫Identifies surfaces in graphic elements that won’t be visible in a scene when it’s fully rendered ▫Discards that data before the scene is textured, lit, and shaded. Advantages: ▫Eliminates redundant processing ▫Requires less power & memory

3D Graphic Toolkit Developed by Intel Uses shortcuts to approx. the floating-point arithmetic, division, trig, etc. Advantage: ▫Saves computational resources

Standardizing Ericsson, Motorola, and Siemens Define standardize APIs and software development kits (SDKs) that developers could use to build games. Advantage: ▫Save Time & Money ▫Focus on the game ▫Works on Multiple devices

Handheld-Gaming Platform Sun Microsystems’ Java 2 Platform, micro Edition (J2ME) ▫Java and related tools to develop applications ▫J2ME-enabled device can run Java code ▫Current offers  The Connected Limited Device Configuration  The Connected Device Configuration

Handheld-Gaming Platform Qualcomm’s Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW) ▫Wireless-application-development platform for phones ▫Runs between the application and the mobile chip’s OS software

Challenges Low US Interest ▫Cultural and geographical differences Business Model ▫Appropriate pricing level Technical Issues ▫Unreliable connection

Future Potential Multiplayer Games ▫The interactive experience Technology Advances ▫Faster processors and networks ▫Longer lasting batteries ▫Shaper color screens

A Mobile Gaming Primer Early wireless games ▫Function within minimal processing and memory resource ▫Wireless networks’ limited bandwidth Nowadays ▫Processors that runs up to 400MHz and hole up to 64Mbytes ▫Store and run bigger and better games ▫Larger screens and color display

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