Scope quality retaining display rendering workload scaling based on user smartphone distance
Modern smartphone display system come equipped with powerful GPU's capable of rendering advanced 2D and 3D graphics. These GPU's make up a significant portion of the system power profile due to the high resolution and framerate of smartphone display. These display features are selected during the design phase of a smartphone and correspond to the capabilities of the human visual system (HVS) However, the level of detail observable by the HVS is not static and changes with user smartphone distance. In this paper we propose Scope, a system which alters the rendering resolution and framerate on a smartphone to scale display rendering workload in response to real time changes in user smartphone distance. We demonstrate a new method of measuring this distance in real time which is able to minimize front facing camera sampling through the use of sensor fusion techniques. The result is that Scope requires a power overhead of only 20mW on average as the front facing camera need only be sampled 4 times per minute. We demonstrate that Scope is able to reduce smartphone power consumption up to 58% while retaining visual quality in most cases.
2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD)