Microsoft Research
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 19 months, 2012–2024
3:23 · 1.4M views · Mar 6, 2012
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.
HN commenters cite it whenever input latency comes up, as the demonstration that people can perceive touch delay down to 1 ms.
20 comments from Hacker News
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
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
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.
You can easily observe how significant latency is in videos like this: this video (Microsoft Research presenting its ultra low latency displays for touch interactions). Many mobile games have you drag and drop things, so it's not like it's just first person shooters that suffer from latency. You're a lay person, you couldn't have known this, you're using words with very specific meaning to streaming (like latency) and you're comparing it to human reaction times, which are measuring something else entirely. You kind of reasoned about from a first principle in a very Paulgrahamarian way, and it led you deeply astray. That happens. And you're not the only person doing this, this is a comment section full of people who play games and parrot stuff they seen in YouTube, and don't have a concrete grasp of what it is they're even talking about, so it's understandable when it's laypeople shouting at laypeople that it's just a bunch of blah. One of the reasons I hate HN and write in throwaways nowadays is that the comments section is a better example of Knoll's law than actual journalism.
The F1166 standard permits up to 250ms latency for touch screen response. That is ridiculously high. It practically guarantees people will think it's not working and tap again, undoing any toggle function they might have activated. They won't necessarily notice their mistake. I once accidentally ran a washing machine at 90C temperature because of high-latency touch controls. I instinctively double-pressed the touch surface to reduce temperature because I thought the first touch hadn't registered, causing it to wrap around back to maximum. It did some minor damage to the clothes before I noticed. And that was with more like 200ms latency, not 250ms. Latency on touchscreens is more important than with physical controls because there's no tactile feedback. Even 10ms is obviously imperfect for drag controls. Microsoft Research published a demonstration video: this video