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Applied Sciences Group: High Performance Touch

Microsoft Research

359K subscribers • 12 videos on Hallway

Recommended by 3 people: 3 on Hacker News.
Presented by Albert Ng and Paul Dietz, Microsoft researchers
Made by the vendor. The company whose product it covers made or sponsored it.

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

1.4M views14 years ago3 recommendations

Graphics and audio Hardware Rendering Performance and optimization Embedded systems

Microsoft researchers demonstrate the dramatic impact of touch input latency on user experience, comparing delays from 100 milliseconds down to 1 millisecond.

Modern touch devices allow one to interact with virtual objects. However, there is a substantial delay between when a finger moves and the display responds. Microsoft researchers, Albert Ng and Paul Dietz, have built a laboratory test system that allows us to experience the impact of different latencies on the user experience. The results help us to understand how far we still have to go in improving touch performance.

Why it's here

3 people recommend this

What people say. Frequently cited as the definitive demonstration of how humans perceive touch input latency and why low latency is critical.

dyladanon Hacker News • 9 years agoRecommends

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 link to this video

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pcr910303on Hacker News • 7 years agoRecommends

On “iPadOS”

It can be very detectable, I'd say. Try watching this: link to this video It shows the difference between from >100ms to ~1ms. It's mind baffling.

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Junk_Collectoron Hacker News • 6 years agoRecommends

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. link to this video

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nemo1618on Hacker News • 14 years agoMentions

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. link to this video

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saidajigumion Hacker News • 13 years agoMentions

On “The ways of Wayland”

…le of this issue. Similar ideas also apply to touch34 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 #1 on HN: link 3 link 4 link to this video…

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Leszekon Hacker News • 11 years agoMentions

On “Microsoft Surface Hub”

You'd be surprised how sensitive we are to latency on input. Microsoft themselves did studies on it: link to this video

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cslon Hacker News • 11 years agoMentions

On “Apple Unveils the iPad Pro”

Seems the holy grail is a really tough 1ms: link to 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.

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AmVesson Hacker News • 9 years agoMentions

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. link to 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.

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solarkrafton Hacker News • 8 years agoMentions

On “Computer latency: 1977-2017”

I'm happy to see someone thinking about latency about like I do. This Microsoft study ( link to this video ) keeps lingering in the back of my mind. The most annoying latencies I've seen so far are scrolling on Android and Trackpad mouse moving on Linux (x11).

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spyderon Hacker News • 7 years agoMentions

On “What to Do When You Get Sherlocked by Apple”

Just watching their promo video about the Astropad Studio on their website, what I see is the latency for drawing is annoyingly bad (and they show it exactly when they're talking about "lightning fast speed" :O ) link But part of the problem is probably the drawing software too, because even native drawing has different latency between drawing apps: link It's not an easy problem because even 1 ms latency is noticeable in drawing as Microsoft research showed: link to this video

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dan-robertsonon Hacker News • 6 years agoMentions

On “iOS First Impressions (2018)”

iOS is smooth but not as smooth as I would like. The input-to-render latency matters a lot when dragging things and you can really feel it even though you probably wouldn’t notice the difference between 50 and 10ms of latency for something like a key press. See this video demonstrating what 1ms of latency looks like (and where they optimistically aim to have it in 10 years by 2022): link to this video

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raszon Hacker News • 6 years agoMentions

On “Fast 2D Rendering on GPU”

You are probably thinking link to this video Bottleneck is in the input layer. While using a desktop computer look at the mouse cursor, now move the mouse - hardware accelerated 2D graphics, imperceptible latency. Low latency thru orthogonal multiplexing link

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ksecon Hacker News • 5 years agoMentions

On “Speed Is the Killer Feature”

May be Speed isn't the right word, Latency would be better. We can look at Input Lag 1, and Microsoft Research's work 2 on Touch Input. Apple's ProMotion being part of that as well. For the past 20 years we have make 10 - 100x improvement in bandwidth at the expense of Latency. Now we need to do more work on it . Especially if we want VR or AR which are extremely latency sensitive. John Carmack 3 used to talk a lot about it when he was still working on Oculus. How it was faster sending something hundreds of miles away than showing it on your computer screen. 1 link 2 link to this video 3 link

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vanderZwanon Hacker News • 4 years agoMentions

On “Porting Zelda Classic to the web”

Oh thank goodness, so it's not just me who is driven insane by the mouse lag in browser input. And while I understand your cynicism, I don't think it's deliberate as much as it's complacency, given that it's latency issues all the way down when it comes to modern user interfaces. A literal decade ago Microsoft Research uploaded a video highlighting how much of an effect minimizing latency for touchscreens had on the user experience0. The vast majority of tablets still utterly suck in this regard a decade later, and I wonder if any manage to get below the 10ms barrier. And of course there is Dan Luu's famous 2017 article on computer latency in general1. 0 link to this video 1 link

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namibjon Hacker News • 4 years agoMentions

On “Riot Games: Artificial Latency for Remote Competitors”

I think you meant link to this video . It was indeed not too easy to find, due to SEO tactics polluting YT search with gaming-oriented stuff from recent times (where one may actually reach the frame rates necessary for such low latencies in a frame-by-frame display technology).

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streamingbroon Hacker News • 4 years agoMentions

On “Google is shutting down Stadia”

You can easily observe how significant latency is in videos like this: link to 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 secti…

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