Integrating Game Engines into the Mobile Cloud as Micro-services

Abstract

Game engines have been widely adopted in fields other than games, such as data visualization and game-based education. As the number of mobile devices owned by each person increases, extra resources are available in personal device clouds, expanding typical learning space to outside of the classroom and increasing possibilities for teacher-student interactions. Owning multiple devices poses the problem of how to make use of idle resources on devices that are slightly dated or lack portability compared to newer models. Such resources include CPU power, display, and data storage. In order to solve this problem, an architecture is proposed for mobile applications to access these resources on various mobile devices. The main approach used here is to divide an application into several modules and distribute them over a personal device cloud (formed by same-user-owned devices) as micro-services. In this architecture, game engines will be incorporated as a render module to tap in its rendering capability. Additionally, modules will communicate using CoAP which has minimal overhead. To evaluate the feasibility of such architecture, a prototype is implemented and deployed over a mobile device, and tested in a modest context that is similar to real life settings.