Controlling the transfer of Kinect data to a cloud-hosted games platform

Increases in broadband access bandwidth in recent years have meant that it has become viable to offer games as cloud-hosted applications. This is attractive for many games users as they are not required to own relatively expensive games consoles. Whilst most cloud hosted games rely on traditional game controller inputs, it is likely that in the near future that: 1) they will seek to support controller-free sensed inputs such as those gathered by Microsoft's Kinect; and 2) games will require continuously updated images of the gamer(s) for inclusion in the game itself. In this paper we investigate the use of the Kinect as an input device for cloud-hosted games. We propose a protocol that allows a game server request specific information from the game and specify a simple image segmentation algorithm that can be applied at the client to decrease the volume of data that needs to be transferred to the server. Our implementation shows that the use of this protocol should make it feasible to support the use of Kinect for this purpose on typical consumer broadband access band-widths.