Energy-aware adaptations in mobile 3d graphics.

Smartphone devices are becoming the de facto personal computing platform, rivaling the desktop, as the number of smartphone users is projected to reach 1.1 billion by 2013. Unlike the desktop, smartphones have a constrained energy budget, which is further challenged by increasingly sophisticated applications. Amongst the most popular applications on smartphone devices are games and virtual environments that rely on 3D graphics. Due to the computational intensity of geometry and rasterization, as well as the perpetually illuminated display, these applications are extremely power-hungry. To prolong the battery life of devices running these applications, we propose two new energy-aware adaptation schemes that can be employed in 3D graphics applications: lighting limitation and textural transformation. Our results show that we can conserve between 20% and 33% of energy with acceptable sacrifices to a user's visual experience.