Gadgetory

these days we've become used to instant gratification whether it's ordering at a drive-through looking up incredibly important information on the connected computer in your pocket or gaming with someone on the other side of the planet we expect lots of things to happen instantaneously but as much as our technology has advanced we're still fighting the dreaded problem of latency and no I'm not talking about your repressed Freudian desires what I mean by latency is the gap in time between some kind of input like a key presser turning your head in a VR headset and the system spitting out the appropriate response and this latency affects the way that you use tons of things in the real world but why don't elect Rissa tea and radio waves travel super fast well yes they do in fact radio waves travel at the speed of a light while electricity traveling through wires can go up to nearly the speed of light but the issue isn't with how quickly a signal goes from A to B instead latency is caused by processing times and since any kind of input to a computer has to be processed everything has at least some amount of latency this can be very noticeable in situations where a slow hard drive causes doing something simple like finding a picture on your computer to be agonizingly slow or when a webpage is designed poorly and you can't click on anything for a few seconds while it finishes rendering you've also probably noticed latency if well if you've ever watched an interview via satellite on a news channel where the subject takes a few seconds to start responding to the reporters questions often these kinds of latency won't completely screw up what you're trying to do I mean waiting an extra 15 seconds to look at that TPS report probably won't ruin your day but latency can be an absolute killer in other situations if you enjoy playing games online I network latency is caused by processing at each point in the network can cause weird laggy behavior that can result in catastrophic in-game mishaps or even getting kicked off the game server completely you can learn more about latency and games up here and believe it or not the consequence of high latency can be even worse than getting fragged in csgo with car manufacturers increasingly installing backup cameras and some cars even completely ditching mirrors in favour of cameras such as this BMW i8 we were checking out last year and I'm wearing a lavalier microphone on me that'll give you guys an exact idea of how much delay there is between something happening and what's on the screen low latency is a must so that drivers can react to hazards in time even half a second delay could lead to a tragic accident so how do you cut down on latency other than just having a faster computer well in computing context a common tactic is to use wires where possible instead of going wireless a good example of this is how current VR headsets like the oculus rift and the HTC vive rely on wired connections to a PC although these wires are cumbersome wireless tech typically has greater latency due to more complicated processing which could mean disorienting or nauseating display lag when you're in a virtual world this is sometimes called motion to photon latency and if you're gaming online and you have a choice of servers pick the one geographically closest to you although electrical signals travel insanely quickly latency of a few hundred milliseconds can still be an issue when you're connecting to a far away server and that's enough to wreck your gaming experience in most cases there's also software and even special network adapters that push through data packets from your game before others so they won't be stuck waiting around for other applications on your system some routers can even be configured to push packets to your system first to reduce latency if a few people on your network are rudely deciding that now is the time that they have to watch that episode on Netflix now of course you're never going to get rid of latency completely I mean there's even I - brain latency since your brain needs time to make sense of whatever the heck you're looking at the goal is to get it down to an acceptable level that won't leave you frustrated or with a lawsuit on your hands because your backup camera didn't show you that little old lady in time we've teamed up with audible they're offering everyone watching this video a chance to try them out for free for 30 days audible has an unmatched selection of audiobooks which are great to listen to when you're stuck in traffic on the train running errands playing games that you don't need to listen to the audio - or whatever else you happen to be doing I've personally been listening to the princess diarist by Carrie Fisher a behind-the-scenes recollection of her experiences filming Star Wars episodes 4 from Princess Leia herself and audible is offering a free audiobook with your trial to you so you can listen to it - just go to audible.com slash tech quickie sign up download a free title maybe that one and start listening that easy alright guys like if you liked it dislike you could just like to check out our other channel channel super fun or even Linus tech tips we do some we do some funny gags and gasps and memes over there if you want to get subscribed that would be awesome if you want to go down below and give us a suggestion for a different tech quickie that we could make maybe something on the history of something you're interested in leave that down below I'll see you next time