Back to the future: a hybrid approach to transparent sharing of video games over the internet in real time

  • Authors:

  • Sili Zhao;Du Li;Tun Lu;Ning Gu

  • Affiliations:

  • Fudan University, Shanghai, China;Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, USA;Fudan University, Shanghai, China;Fudan University, Shanghai, China

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

This paper presents a collaboration transparency system that allows for distributed sharing of legacy collocated video games in real time without modifying the original games. Our system has attracted two million registered players since it was launched in late 2008. As the system went beyond a research prototype and reached a large number of real users, we observed performance issues that were mainly caused by unpredicted networking latencies over the public Internet and opportunistic distinction of roles such as active players and passive observers. To address these issues, we propose a novel hybrid consistency control approach that combines the merits of optimistic methods, which help achieve interactivity, and pessimistic methods, which guarantee consistency. As a result, the system can tolerate network round-trip time up to 230 ms, improving the latest work by 43.7%. In addition, the system can support over 1,000 simultaneous observers when a video game is played over the Internet.