Alex Dailey (Xan Linden) wrote: > Here's a challenge to sldev. Viewer performance is complex, dependent on > bandwidth, hardware, the content on the region, other avatars, and so > on. What do you think a) is the one variable viewer performance should > ultimately be measured by and b) what are, say, three predictive > variables that influence the dependent variable.
Define "performance" and I'll tell you how to measure it. Or vice versa. ;-) Using Allen's the non-technical definition cited on wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Computer_performance&oldid=293171037#cite_ref-0> /The word/ performance /in computer performance means the same thing that performance means in other contexts, that is, it means "How well is the computer doing the work it is supposed to do?" / the question remains what the viewer is supposed to do, which varies wildly from use case to use case. I have the theory that most variables that affect at least one of the use cases also affect the use case where the user wants to maximize immersion. (By which I mean the type of immersion one also has when reading a book, not the one achieved by HMDs and cyber gloves. Note that the prior is still affected by technical issues: If you read a book with missing pages, hard to read font or a cover that smells funny (and the smell isn't related to the story at all) your ability to immerse will undoubtedly suffer.) Of course, potential immersion has the problem of being poorly defined, too, and not directly measurable. You'd have to do surveys or something, and if you did that you could just directly ask about user experience instead. However I think it's an interesting variable for theoretic considerations: Note that the influence of most variables on immersion (and user experiance in general) is highly nonlinear. Let's take update rates (FPS if we look at graphics). Whether FPS are at 0.5 or 2, I don't mind. In both cases I see single frames instead of continuous motion.Whether they're at 100 or 1000 is also irrelevant, you can't tell the difference with a 60Hz TFT. Though, for the interval between 3 and maybe 30, even slight differences are noticeable enough to matter. This goes for server issues, too: Whether 1% or 10% of group IMs get delivered ... who cares, group IM wouldn't be a reliable medium in either case. The difference between 81% and 90% or even between 90.9% and 99.9%, although nominally also 9%, would be a big one, though. Also, the influence of different variables is often interdependent. Some problems might mask other problems, for example. Ann Otoole wrote: > User experience is tied more to the sim performance than viewer > performance. As someone using SL from a low end system I often hardly notice poor Sim performance, because my viewer is struggling in crowded areas anyway. Both, the masking effect and the nonlinearity of the influences, could probably be used to optimize the experience by automatically balancing them. The most simple variant would be to automatically decrease graphics settings when the FPS hits a lower threshold (say, 5) and to increase them again when hitting a higher threshold (say, the monitor's refresh rate). (Having to manually counteract immersion breaking effects is something that itself hurts immersion.) This already got rather lengthy, so I'll stop for now. cheers Boroondas
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