3 ms·

This is why you should develop user interfaces on last-gen (or gen-before-that) hardware. Developers optimize things that look slow to them so if you're on the

by taneq 4y ago

This is why you should develop user interfaces on last-gen (or gen-before-that) hardware. Developers optimize things that look slow to them so if you're on the latest firebreathing top end hardware, nothing seems slow. If you're on a 5-year-old i5 then you become very aware of which code is OK and which code is unacceptably slow. That said, VR is the unsung hero of finally improving the awful jitter that most gaming hardware and software was developing 10 years ago. I don't care if your new graphics card can maintain 200fps on average if it has 100ms latency spikes every second. Smooth is important.

robinsonb5 4y ago
Not just last-gen hardware, but also with a network that deliberately drops maybe 0.5% of packets, and delays some at random! I hadn't considered the VR aspect, but you're absolutely right - the jarring nature of UI "jank" would be literally nauseating in VR.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  > with a network that deliberately drops maybe 0.5% of packets, and delays some at random! I've seen Sun's Crossbow stuff in use once, but it made quite an impression - it allowed testing many failure scenarios with relatively little effort.
- taneq 4y ago
  Yeah, there's a hard latency threshold beyond which most users very quickly get VR sickness. Abrash has some fascinating writeups on the research he was involved in at Oculus back in the early days. Like you say, modern devs really need to remember to test against a high latency unreliable network. Or even just against a lack of network at all... it constantly astounds me that companies like Microsoft can let critical, central components like the start menu cease functioning without an internet connection. I recently had the start menu refuse to find any programs on my computer because it was trying to get to Bing and I was on a remote site with only local Ethernet plugged in.

by taneq 4y ago

robinsonb5 4y ago

Not just last-gen hardware, but also with a network that deliberately drops maybe 0.5% of packets, and delays some at random! I hadn't considered the VR aspect, but you're absolutely right - the jarring nature of UI "jank" would be literally nauseating in VR.

rbanffy 4y ago
> with a network that deliberately drops maybe 0.5% of packets, and delays some at random! I've seen Sun's Crossbow stuff in use once, but it made quite an impression - it allowed testing many failure scenarios with relatively little effort.
taneq 4y ago
Yeah, there's a hard latency threshold beyond which most users very quickly get VR sickness. Abrash has some fascinating writeups on the research he was involved in at Oculus back in the early days. Like you say, modern devs really need to remember to test against a high latency unreliable network. Or even just against a lack of network at all... it constantly astounds me that companies like Microsoft can let critical, central components like the start menu cease functioning without an internet connection. I recently had the start menu refuse to find any programs on my computer because it was trying to get to Bing and I was on a remote site with only local Ethernet plugged in.