Designing for low-latency direct-touch input

  • Authors:

  • Albert Ng;Julian Lepinski;Daniel Wigdor;Steven Sanders;Paul Dietz

  • Affiliations:

  • Microsoft Applied Sciences Group, Redmond, Washington, USA;University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada;University of Toronto, Toronto, CanadaAutodesk, HTC, Apple, Microsoft, University of Washington, Harvard University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada;Sanders Capital, New York, New York, USA;Microsoft Applied Sciences Group, Redmond, Washington, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Software designed for direct-touch interfaces often utilize a metaphor of direct physical manipulation of pseudo "real-world" objects. However, current touch systems typically take 50-200ms to update the display in response to a physi-cal touch action. Utilizing a high performance touch de-monstrator, subjects were able to experience touch latencies ranging from current levels down to about 1ms. Our tests show that users greatly prefer lower latencies, and noticea-ble improvement continued well below 10ms. This level of performance is difficult to achieve in commercial compu-ting systems using current technologies. As an alternative, we propose a hybrid system that provides low-fidelity visu-al feedback immediately, followed by high-fidelity visuals at standard levels of latency.