While cloud gaming has brought considerable advantages for its customers, from the point of view of cloud providers, multiple aspects related to infrastructure management still fall short of such kind of service. Indeed, differently from traditional cloud-ready applications, modern game engines are still based on monolithic software architectures. This aspect precludes the applicability of fine-grained resource management and service orchestration schemes, ultimately leading to poor cost-effectiveness. To mitigate these shortcomings, we propose a Cloud-Oriented Distributed Engine for Gaming (CODEG). Thanks to its distributed nature, CODEG is capable of fully exploiting the resource heterogeneity present in cloud data centers, while providing the possibility of spanning its service on multiple network layers up to the edge clouds.

The interfaces among different organisational functions are often affected by barriers against integration, particularly in the case of design and manufacturing. The relevance of overcoming such barriers – that may become a driver of cost and opportunity loss – grows with the degree of virtualisation of the enterprise. In this paper the authors tackle the problem of lowering barriers between design and manufacturing in virtual enterprises through the exploitation of ICT (information and communication technology), that – in this vision – becomes a key success factor not only for eliciting (tacit) knowledge, but also for fostering social interaction. The paper explores the possibility to use virtual worlds (such as Multi User Virtual Environments) in virtual enterprises for creating suitable digital habitats able to support the higher levels of the semiotic ladder and then lowering the design–manufacturing integration barriers.