Immersive voice communication for massively multiplayer online games

In this paper, we propose a voice communication scheme, called immersive voice communication (IVC), to provide massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) players with the immersive experience to hear the voice of neighbor players within the area of interest (AOI). IVC is a peer-to-peer based scheme, so it does not impose too many extra loads on the original MMOG system. It further uses a relation model to classify neighbors of a player into listeners and the overhearers, and allocates less bandwidth to the latter than to the former for reducing the voice data traffic without sacrificing the user experience. IVC is also a latency- and bandwidth-aware scheme. It adopts the network coordinate system (NCS) to help construct the adaptive k-ary tree (Ak-tree) to reduce the voice data transmission latency and efficiently utilize the bandwidth. As shown by the simulation results, the proposed scheme outperforms other related schemes. We also implement IVC and integrate it with a spatialized voice rendering mechanism to realize an MMOG-like gallery guiding system for evaluating the user experience of IVC under the technology acceptance model (TAM). The TAM analysis results show that users consider IVC helpful and easy to use, and thus have high intention to use IVC.