Applied Sciences Group: High Performance Touch
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters cite it whenever input latency comes up, as the demonstration that people can perceive touch delay down to 1 ms.
What it is
A Microsoft Research demo from TechFest 2012 of a lab touch system that lets viewers feel the effect of different input latencies, down to about 1 ms. It shows how much more responsive dragging feels compared with typical 100 ms touch delay.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2012 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends dyladan · 2017-09 · on “Hey Synaptics, Can You Please Stop Polling”
Yes there is. Humans are normally not very responsive to the time between when an action is started and when it is carried out on the screen, but this changes for actions like drawing and dragging. This is the reason for the new Pro Motion behavior on the recently released iPad Pro models. For more information, this video [1] is a good place to start. [1] [this video]
Recommends pcr910303 · 2019-06 · on “iPadOS”
It can be very detectable, I'd say. Try watching this: [this video] It shows the difference between from >100ms to ~1ms. It's mind baffling.
Recommends Junk_Collector · 2020-07 · on “How much your computer can do in a second (2015)”
I'm taking issue with latency in general and it's dismissal. There are reams of ergonomic targets, data, and guides on user interface latency that are just completely ignored these days. A terminal is close to the simplest possible interface whose job is to provide input and output to a user with as little disruption as possible. 30 ms is in fact noticeable. Here is a short video from Microsoft (about 10 years old now) on the experience of using a touchscreen with 100ms of delay vs 1ms showing the steps in between. The difference is extraordinary for the user even if the end result is the same. [this video]
Cites nemo1618 · 2012-06 · on “Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet”
Anyone happen to know if it uses their new ultra-responsive (1ms) touchscreen technology? I remember being pretty excited about that when they demoed it, but it seemed like it wouldn't be rolled out for a while. [this video]
Cites saidajigumi · 2013-03 · on “The ways of Wayland”
From TFA: > The first important idea is that in Wayland, every > frame is regarded as "perfect." That is, the client > application draws it in a completed form [...] This is interesting, but also seems to run counter to recent work on the importance of very low latency feedback. See John Carmack's recent article on latency mitigation for VR headsets[1][2] for a very detailed example of this issue. Similar ideas also apply to touch[3][4] and even good old keyboard & mouse input schemes. There's a tradeoff between "perfect" frames and latency (see Carmack's post). From the quote, it appears that Wayland's design choice may limit achievable latencies for low-latency applications. [1] [LINK] [2]
Cites Leszek · 2015-05 · on “Microsoft Surface Hub”
You'd be surprised how sensitive we are to latency on input. Microsoft themselves did studies on it: [this video]
Cites csl · 2015-09 · on “Apple Unveils the iPad Pro”
Seems the holy grail is a really tough 1ms: [this video] Hard to see from the videos, but I don't really expect anything better than 10ms. At least, we can hope to see incremental improvements in the coming years.
Cites AmVess · 2017-10 · on “Keyboard latency”
Yes, and something like a touch interface is very obvious, too. Look at this video on Youtube from Microsoft Applied Sciences Group: High Performance Touch. [this video] You can plainly see that 100ms is an eternity. While keyboards aren't the same thing, but high latency is noticeable. I had to change a keyboard because of the near eternity of when I pressed a key and when it registered on the screen. The difference between the old and the new is quite stark.