!!Con West 2019 - M. Lazer-Walker: Computers are fast! But how come they sometimes feel slow?

Presented at !!Con West 2019: http://bangbangcon.com/west It’s super-important for computers to feel responsive. Everyone from academic HCI researchers to revenue-focused product managers have been telling us this for years. And yet, even as computers have gotten faster and faster, it often feels like the software we use daily has gotten slower! What’s the deal with that? Why is latency so hard to minimize, and how can we even measure or detect that? How can we make things better for users, either by making things speedier or just making it feel like they are? This talk will cover all of that and more. We’ll focus largely on games, as competitive-level gamers demanding frame-perfect input over severe network constraints are a particularly extreme (and interesting!) edge case.