Game Audio Impacts on Players’ Visual Attention, Model Performance for Cloud Gaming

Cloud gaming (CG) is a new approach to deliver a high-quality gaming experience to gamers anywhere, anytime, and on any device. To achieve this goal, CG requires a high bandwidth, which is still a major challenge. Many existing research pieces have focused on modeling or predicting the players’ Visual Attention Map (VAM) and allocating bitrate accordingly. Although studies indicate that both modalities of audio and video influence human perception, a few studies considered audio impacts in the cloud-based attention models. This paper demonstrates that the audio features in video games change the players’ VAMs in various game scenarios. Our findings indicated that incorporating game audio improves the accuracy of the predicted attention maps by 13% on average compared to the previous VAMs generated based on visual saliency by Game Attention Model for CG. The audio impact is more evident in video games with fewer visual components or indicators on the screen.