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Perceiving, Interacting and Playing with Multimedia Delays

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Abstract

Just like interactions with the physical world, humans prefer to interact with computers without noticeable delay. However, in the digital world, the time between cause and effect can far exceed what we are accustomed to in real life. System processes, network transmission and rendering all add to the delay between an input action and an output response. While we expect and accept a computer system to process a request within a period of time, the duration of this period is dependent on the nature of the task. Highly interactive tasks, such as control systems, computer games, design software and even word processing have stringent temporal requirements, where any sustained delay can be detrimental to performance. The research interest for the human capability to operate with delay has grown over the past decades, and it has grown in at least three separate fields. In this chapter, we review relevant work from cognitive psychology, human-computer interaction and multimedia research.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Illustration by Ivar Kjellmo.

  2. 2.

    see Footnote 1

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Correspondence to Ragnhild Eg .

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Eg, R., Raaen, K. (2018). Perceiving, Interacting and Playing with Multimedia Delays. In: Montagud, M., Cesar, P., Boronat, F., Jansen, J. (eds) MediaSync. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65840-7_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65840-7_8

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