Can gamers detect cloud delay?

Abstract

In many games, a win or a loss is not only contingent on the speedy reaction of the players, but also on how fast the game can react to them. From our ongoing project, we aim to establish perceptual thresholds for visual delays that follow user actions. In this first user study, we eliminated the complexities of a real game and asked participants to adjust the delay between the push of a button and a simple visual presentation. At the most sensitive, our findings reveal that some perceive delays below 40 ms. However, the median threshold suggests that motor-visual delays are more likely than not to go undetected below 51-90 ms. These results will in future investigations be compared to thresholds for more complex visual stimuli, and to thresholds established from different experimental approaches.