Computer games have evolved alongside technologies such as personal computers, touchscreens, and virtual reality (VR). The devices have different interaction modes with distinct affordances, including direct physical control with tablets and immersive experiences in VR. Moreover, games are now easily accessible across devices due to cloud-based streaming. Despite this benefit, the challenge of delay persists and continues to affect both performance and quality of experience in games. The negative impact of delay is well-documented, but less is known about how its effect may interplay with a device's interaction mode. This study applies a cross-platform game with controlled levels of delay, where players use different interaction modes to select moving targets. The findings highlight how the detrimental effect of delay on player performance degradation varies across devices (worst on a PC compared to VR and a tablet, and best on the tablet) even while the interaction mode mediates the effects of delay (quality of experience is fairly stable across all conditions and devices, with VR the most immersive).

Materials:

• Paper: pdf
• Slides: pptx

See also:

• Shengmei Liu and Mark Claypool. The Impact of Latency on Target Selection in First-Person Shooter Games, In Proceedings of the ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys), Vancouver, Canada, June 7-10, 2023. Online at: https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/3d-selection-23/

• Shengmei Liu, Mark Claypool, Andy Cockburn, Ragnhild Eg, Carl Gutwin, and Kjetil Raaen. Datasets - Moving Target Selection with Delay, In Proceedings of the ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys), Istanbul, Turkey, September 28 - October 1, 2021. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/selection-datasets/

• Shengmei Liu and Mark Claypool. Game Input with Delay - A Model of the Time Distribution for Selecting a Moving Target with a Mouse, In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on MultiMedia Modeling (MMM), Virtual Conference, June 22-24, 2021. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/selection-model/

• Mark Claypool, Andy Cockburn and Carl Gutwin. The Impact of Motion and Delay on Selecting Game Targets with a Mouse, ACM Transactions on Multimedia, Computing, Communication and Applications (TOMM), Volume 16, Number 2s, Article 73, May 2020. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/delay-motion-tomm/

• Mark Claypool. Game Input with Delay - Moving Target Selection with a Game Controller Thumbstick, ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMM), Special Issue on Delay-Sensitive Video Computing in the Cloud, Volume 14, Number 3, Article 57, https://doi.org/10.1145/3187288, June 2018. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/delay-action-thumbstick/

• Mark Claypool, Ragnhild Eg and Kjetil Raaen. Modeling User Performance for Moving Target Selection with a Delayed Mouse, In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on MultiMedia Modeling (MMM), Reykjavik, Iceland, January 4-6, 2017. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/delay-action-mmm/