Influence of auditory latency on game experience and player performance

Generally speaking, latency is the difference in time between cause and effect. In human-computer interaction (HCI), latency is the time that passes before a user perceives the reactions to his actions. The perception is not limited to one channel but can be auditory, visual or haptic in nature [1].

High latency leads to poor performance and user experience in the HCI[2, 3]. Video games are also affected by these negative effects. Players score fewer points, need more time to work on certain tasks, or can not solve certain tasks at all [4, 5].

The sounds of a game are important to how users feel while playing and how well they perform in-game. Therefore, developers have placed a steadily increasing focus on audio and sounds in games[6].

Since the proliferation of wireless headphones there has been a discussion on the differences between wired and wireless [7]. Most wireless headphones use Bluetooth, a short-range communication method. In order to send the sound to the headphones, Bluetooth compresses the data before sending it and then unpacks it afterwards to play the sounds [8, 9]. This process of compressing and unpacking takes some time, which is one of the reasons wireless methods have a greater latency.

This work wants to find out, if and how this latency impacts user experience and performance.

An already existing 3d game will be changed by adding sound to all enemies and changing the mechanics slightly. Afterwards, in a second version of the game a delay will be added to all sounds.

To test whether/how this influences users, a study is then carried out where the participants play the same game once with and once without audio latency. To gather the data we will log the scores and the time enemies survive. Additionally, a questionnaire will be used to measure game experience.

To evaluate the quantitative data differences statistical tests will be used. The goal is to determine if and how latency on audio affects the user.

• Literature research
• Implementing sound to an existing video game
• Conduct a user study
• Evaluate the data
• Write the scientific paper

• Programming in unity and c#
• Data analysis

[1] Latency. (2021). Wikipeda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latency_(engineering), Retrieved: 12.03.2021 [2] Jota, R., Ng, A., Dietz, P. & Wigdor, D. (2013). How fast is fast enough? a study of the effects of latency in direct-touch pointing tasks. In Proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems (S. 2291–2300). New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/2470654.2481317 [3] Annett, M., Anderson, F., Bischof, W. F. & Gupta, A. (2014). The pen is mightier: Understanding stylus behaviour while inking on tablets. In Proceedings of graphics interface 2014 (S. 193–200). CAN: Canadian Information Processing Society. doi: 10.5555/2619648.2619680 [4] Beigbeder, T., Coughlan, R., Lusher, C., Plunkett, J., Agu, E. & Claypool, M. (2004). The effects of loss and latency on user performance in unreal tournament 2003®. In Proceedings of 3rd acm sigcomm workshop on network and system support for games (S. 144–151). New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/1016540.1016556 [5] Eg, R., Raaen, K. & Claypool, M. (2018). Playing with delay: With poor timing comes poor performance, and experience follows suit. In 2018 tenth international conference on quality of multimedia experience (qomex) (S. 1–6). doi: 10.1109/QoMEX .2018.8463382 [6] Andersen, F., King, C. L., & Gunawan, A. A. (2021). Audio Influence on Game Atmosphere during Various Game Events. Procedia Computer Science, 179, 222-231. [7] https://www.fairaudio.de/news/kabelgebundene-vs-bluetooth-kopfhoerer/ [8] Cassioli, D., Detti, A., Loreti, P., Mazzenga, F., & Vatalaro, F. (2002, May). The Bluetooth technology: state of the art and networking aspects. In International Conference on Research in Networking (pp. 479-490). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. [9] Hussein, A. F., Hashim, S. J., Aziz, A. F. A., Rokhani, F. Z., & Adnan, W. A. W. (2017). A real time ECG data compression scheme for enhanced bluetooth low energy ECG system power consumption. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, 1-14.