MPEG-4 based framework for game engines to handle virtual advertisements in game

Online gaming is a convergence industry segment with a proven revenue model and an existing user base. Inserting advertisements in games provides another revenue opportunity for the game designer and service providers. Virtual advertisement is the method of inserting advertisements into the game in a non-obstructive way. For online game service providers, changing these virtual advertisement scenes based on time/player-profile is required to attract local sponsors. This requires replacing objects in game scenes with dynamic advertisement objects of similar image attributes. Since there is no standardized framework for this, the service provider needs to know inside details of the game engine. This paper proposes an MPEG-4 based framework for virtual advertisements in online games. During online gaming, the game server will send the virtual advertisements (dynamic ad objects) to the game machines. In the game machines the dynamic ad objects will be used to replace the static ad objects already present in the game. This will allow the game server to send different dynamic ad objects to each player. Also the computation load for the game machine will be minimum because of FlexMux support of MPEG-4.