Comment by akdor1154
15 hours ago
How's the latency? Latency is what makes Zoom et al painful for me now - it ruins the ability to politely interject, give confirmatiom, etc. Does Apple do a better job of this than Google/Zoom? In theory you could get 20-30ms (just spitballing numbers I used to get playing shooters!) but i've never got anywhere near that with vid conferencing.
Even so, latency-in-zoom kind of becomes an attribute of the medium and you learn to adapt. How does it feel with the Vision Pro though? The article talks about a really convincing sense of being in the same place with someone - how does latency affect that? (And does it differ based on if you're all physically in Silicon Valley or not?)
The laws of physics means that the longer the path for your network packet, the higher the latency.
One way latency on the Internet across fiber is about 4μs to 5μs per kilometer in my experience.
For example, SF to Paris is ~40ms one way (it used to be 60ms 15y ago, latency and jitter have really improved).
Double those values for the round trip allowing you to interject in a conversation.
Add wifi, which has terrible latency with a lot of jitter (1ms to 400ms jitter is not uncommon). Wi-Fi 7 should reduce the jitter and latency in theory. We shall see improvements in the coming decade. Cellphone 5G did improve latency for me, so I don't doubt WiFi will eventually deliver.
In other words you need to be within 3Mm (3000km) away to get a chance at a 30ms roundtrip. And that's assuming peer to peer without wifi nor slow devices.
For a conference call, everybody connects to a central server acting as the relay. So now the latency budget is halved already.
I would assume any added latency is negligible -- the sensors + interpretation + rendering should be very fast.
But you've still got all the network latency including Wi-Fi latency on both ends. And you always need a small audio buffer so discrete network packets can be assembled into continuous audio without gaps.
So I wouldn't expect this latency to be any different from regular videoconferencing.
> latency-in-zoom kind of becomes an attribute of the medium and you learn to adapt.
To some degree but not fully. When you adapt your brain is still doing extra work to compensate, similarly to how you don’t «hear» jet engine noise after acclimating to an airplane but it will still tire you to some degree.
I had Zoom and Teams meetings daily during Covid, and personal FaceTime calls almost daily for a while. I still get «Zoom fatigue» if a call goes on for over an hour, if I need to talk face to face during the call (i.e. no screen sharing, can’t disable video and look at something else, etc.) I’m fine if I don’t look at people’s faces but rather people’s screen sharing.