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 an 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 headphones [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 higher latency.

This work investigates if and how auditory latency impacts user experience and performance.

This work investigates if and how auditory latency impacts user experience and performance.

• 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

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