these days we become used to instant gratification whether it's ordering at a
drive-thru looking up incredibly important information on the connected
computer in your pocket or gaming with someone on the other side of the planet
we expect lots of things to happen
instantaneously but as much as our technology has advanced we're still
fighting the dreaded problem of latency
and no I'm not talking about your repressed Freud and desires what I mean
by latency is the gap in time between some kind of input like a key press or
turning your head in a VR headset and the system spitting out the appropriate
response and this latency affects the way that you use tons of things in the
real world but why don't electricity and
radio waves travel super fast well yes
they do in fact radio waves travel at the speed of light while electricity
traveling through wire can go up to nearly the speed of light but the issue
isn't with how quickly a signal goes from A to B instead latency is caused by
processing times and since any kind of
input to a computer has to be processed
everything has at least some amount of
latency this can be very noticeable in
situations where a slow hard drive causes doing something simple like
finding a picture on your computer to be agon singly slow or when a web page is
designed poorly and you can't click on anything for a few seconds while it
finishes rendering you've also probably
noticed latency if
uh well if you've ever watched an interview via satellite on a news
channel where the subject takes a few seconds to start responding to the
reporters questions often these kinds of
latency won't completely screw up what you're trying to do I mean waiting an
extra 15 seconds to look at that TPS report probably won't ruin your day but
latency can be an absolute killer in
other situations if you enjoy playing games online high Network latencies
caused by processing at each point in the network can cause weird laggy
behavior that can result in catastrophic in-game mishaps or even getting kicked
off The Game Server completely you can
learn more about latency in games up here and believe it or not the
consequence of high latency can be even worse than getting fragged in csgo with
car manufacturers increasingly installing backup cameras and some cars
even completely ditching mirrors in favor of cameras such as this BMW I8 we
were checking out last year and I'm wearing a lavalier microphone on me that
will give you guys an exact idea of how how much delay there is between
something happening and what's on the screen low
latency is a must so that drivers can
react to hazards in time even half a second delay could lead to a tragic
accident so how do you cut down on latency other than just having a faster
computer well in Computing context a common tactic is to use wires where
possible instead of going Wireless a good example of this is how current VR
headsets like the Rift and the HTC Vive
rely on wired connections to a PC
although these wires are cumbersome wireless tech typically has greater
latency due to more complicated processing which could mean disorienting
or nauseating display lag when you're in a virtual world this is sometimes called
motion to Photon latency and if you're gaming online and you have a choice of
servers pick the one geographically closest to you although electrical
signals travel insanely quickly latency
of a few hundred milliseconds can still be an issue when you're connecting to a
farway server and that's enough to wreck your gaming experience in most cases
there's also software and even special network adapters that push through data
packets from your game before others so
they won't be stuck waiting around for
other application on your
system some routers can even be configured to push packets to your
system first to reduce latency if a few people on your network are rudely
deciding that now is the time that they have to watch that episode on Netflix
now of course you're never going to get rid of latency completely I mean there's
even eye to brain latency since your brain needs time to make sense of
whatever the heck you're looking at the goal is to get it down to an acceptable
level that won't leave you frustrated or with a lawsuit on your hands because
your backup camera didn't show you that little old lady in time we've teamed up
with Audible and they're offering everyone watching this video a chance to
try them out for free for 30 days Audible has an unmatched selection of
Audi books which are great to listen to when you're stuck in traffic on the
train running errands playing games that you don't need to listen to the audio to
or whatever else you happen to be doing I've personally been listening to the
princess diarist by Carrie fiser a
behindth scenes recollection of her experiences filming Star Wars Episodes 4
from Princess Leia herself and audible is offering a free Audi book with your
trial to you so you can listen to it too just go to audible.com tequ sign up
download a free title maybe that one and start listening it's that easy all right
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