The effects of local lag on tightly-coupled interaction in distributed groupware

Tightly-coupled interaction is shared work in which each person's actions immediately and continuously influence the actions of others. Tightly-coupled collaboration is a hallmark of expert behavior in face-to-face activity, but becomes extremely difficult to accomplish over distributed groupware. The main cause of this difficulty is network delay that disrupts people's ability to synchronize their actions with another person. In this paper we report on two studies that explore local lag as a way of reducing this problem. When applied to visual feedback, local lag synchronizes the visual environments of the local and remote clients, preventing one person from getting ahead of the other. We tested the effects of local lag in several delay conditions: we found that the technique significantly improved performance, and that users did not rate local lag as more difficult or frustrating to use. Our studies improve our understanding of local lag and of how it improves tightly-coupled interaction in distributed groupware.

[1]  Sugih Jamin,et al.  An Efficient Synchronization Mechanism for Mirrored Game Architectures , 2002, NetGames '02.

[2]  Hong Chen,et al.  Effects of Local-Lag Mechanism on Task Performance in a Desktop CVE System , 2005, Journal of Computer Science and Technology.

[3]  S. Hart,et al.  Development of NASA-TLX (Task Load Index): Results of Empirical and Theoretical Research , 1988 .

[4]  Carl Gutwin,et al.  Revealing delay in collaborative environments , 2004, CHI.

[5]  Yutaka Ishibashi,et al.  Subjective assessment of fairness among users in multipoint communications , 2006, ACE '06.

[6]  Jouni Smed,et al.  Realizing bullet time effect in multiplayer games with local perception filters , 2004, NetGames '04.

[7]  Jouni Smed,et al.  Realizing the bullet time effect in multiplayer games with local perception filters , 2005, Comput. Networks.

[8]  Steve Benford,et al.  Coping with inconsistency due to network delays in collaborative virtual environments , 1999, VRST '99.

[9]  Praktische Informatik.  Consistency in Replicated Continuous Interactive Media , .

[10]  Kajal T. Claypool,et al.  Latency and player actions in online games , 2006, CACM.

[11]  Martin Mauve,et al.  How to Keep a Dead Man from Shooting , 2000, IDMS.

[12]  Carl Gutwin,et al.  Using cursor prediction to smooth telepointer jitter , 2003, GROUP '03.

[13]  Wim Lamotte,et al.  Objective and subjective evaluation of the influence of small amounts of delay and jitter on a recent first person shooter game , 2004, NetGames '04.

[14]  Lars C. Wolf,et al.  On the impact of delay on real-time multiplayer games , 2002, NOSSDAV '02.

[15]  Christophe Diot,et al.  End-to-end transmission control mechanisms for multiparty interactive applications on the Internet , 1999, IEEE INFOCOM '99. Conference on Computer Communications. Proceedings. Eighteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. The Future is Now (Cat. No.99CH36320).

[16]  Hong Chen,et al.  An HCI method to improve the human performance reduced by local-lag mechanism , 2007, Interact. Comput..

[17]  Marcus Sanchez Svensson,et al.  Instrumental action: the timely exchange of implements during surgical operations , 2007, ECSCW.

[18]  David R. Jefferson,et al.  Virtual time , 1985, ICPP.

[19]  Manuel Menezes de Oliveira Neto,et al.  Perceptual Network Metaphors: Breaking the Network Transparency Paradigm , 2003, MIPS.

[20]  Carl Gutwin,et al.  The effects of network delays on group work in real-time groupware , 2001, ECSCW.

[21]  Steve Benford,et al.  Revealing the realities of collaborative virtual reality , 2000, CVE '00.

[22]  Sampath Rangarajan,et al.  Accuracy in dead-reckoning based distributed multi-player games , 2004, NetGames '04.

[23]  Mark Claypool,et al.  The effects of loss and latency on user performance in unreal tournament 2003® , 2004, NetGames '04.