QoE design tradeoffs for foveated content provision

This paper explores the key tradeoffs for the design and optimization of eye-gaze based content provision for video streaming services. The proposed end-to-end solution, called “foveated content provision”, uses real-time information from connected eye-trackers to dynamically deliver optimized video frames, with higher resolution in areas corresponding to the users' fovea while lowering the quality at the periphery. In this novel approach, the main system constraint is the achievable latency (RTT) in the communication link between content servers and user clients. To cope with various latency levels, several design choices are presented, including varying the size of the high quality region or the resolution for the areas in the user's peripheral field of view. The paper presents a set of experimental results, obtained with real users via a novel event-driven experience sampling method, which is specifically developed to address Quality of Experience (QoE) in foveated content delivery. The results show that several operating points within the system parameter space allows to deliver high levels of QoE, even at latency levels comparable to current 4G networks.