15th
3/90 [Somebody] is talking…
Latency is a huge buzzkill for distributed work. In real time communications, even small amounts of latency make conversation bizarre. By disrupting timing, little bits of delay cause people to talk over each other, have awkward exchanges, appear dishonest and make otherwise sharp-witted individuals appear slow. Because so many collaboration technologies operate in near-real time, with only a couple of hundred milliseconds of delay, we subconsciously think that communication should work just as if the other party were sitting next to us and our minds have a hard time figuring out what to make of things when they are a little off.
Communication technologies, such as IM, have widely adopted mechanisms to ease the impact of delay in conversational terms, such as:
Erik is typing…
This feature takes cues from the user that a message is on its way and notifies the far site that their chat partner isn’t being inattentive, but is merely banging out a message on the keyboard.
Similar mechanisms could be applied to other collaboration technology is well. In video communications, for instance, audio compression and synchronization with video is a major source of latency. I suspect that one-way latency times for a simple 1-bit signal as to whether the mics were picking up speech or not would be at least half those of the full multimedia communication. Using a 1 bit signal, a [Somebody] is talking… feature could alert one side of the video conference that the remote site is about to jump in, even though it won’t be reflected in the audio or video for another 200 milliseconds. I don’t know how substantial an impact this would have, but I suspect such an early warning system could reduce at least some of the occurrences of participants talking over each other and make the presence of latency more explicit.
