Adaptive display power management for OLED displays

Abstract

Mobile gaming has become increasingly popular in the past few years with the proliferation of smartphones that have the increased CPU, memory, and network (3.5G etc.) capabilities to support a vast range of interesting games. In addition, these phones also have high quality displays, such as Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLED) displays, that allow the intricate details in games to be shown in vivid detail to end users. Unfortunately, these displays tend to consume a lot of energy - which in turn limits the amount of time that a user can spend actually playing games on these devices. In this paper, we describe a technique that makes use of saliency, with respect to the end user, to reduce the power consumption of OLED displays when they are used for games, by reducing the brightness of game areas that are not of interest currently to the game player. We evaluated our technique with a user study and showed that even for fast-paced shooting games, our solution is able to save a modest amount of power with no impact in the end user gaming experience.