GVU Technical Report Number:
GIT-GVU-96-33
Title:
The Effects of Variation of System Responsiveness on User Performance in
Virtual Environments
Authors:
Benjamin Watson
Neff Walker
William Ribarsky
Victoria Spaulding
Abstract:
This paper reports on study of the effects on user performance of
system responsiveness in VE systems. Responsiveness is a
time-to-feedback measure, and includes the well-known system latency and
frame time, as well as an additional delay between a user action and the
next input sample used by the rendering process. After a detailed
examination of the components of VE system responsiveness and a review
of the methods by which this responsiveness can be measured and
manipulated, three studies of the effects of mean responsiveness and
responsiveness variation during task performance are presented. These
studies used typical system responsiveness means and patterns of
variation, and were performed on a immersive non-desktop VE system.
Results indicated that variations in responsiveness can affect
performance, but only at standard deviations above 82 ms. Effects were
more detrimental when tasks required more feedback. This suggests that
designers of VE systems implementing control of model complexity to
manipulate system responsiveness need not tightly constrain variation in
system responsiveness, and may wish to make their control sensitive to
required task feedback.
Keywords:
Virtual reality, virtual environments, performance, frame rate, frame
rate variation
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