Recent years have seen a resurgence of virtual reality (VR), sparked by the repurposing of low-cost COTS components. VR aims to generate stimuli that appear to come from a source other than the interface through which they are delivered. The synthetic stimuli replace real-world stimuli, and transport the user to another, perhaps imaginary, “place.” To do this, we must overcome many challenges, often related to matching the synthetic stimuli to the expectations and behavior of the real world. One way in which the stimuli can fail is its latency–– the time between a user's action and the computer's response. We constructed a novel VR renderer, that optimized latency above all else. Our prototype allowed us to explore how latency affects human–computer interaction. We had to completely reconsider the interaction between time, space, and synchronization on displays and in the traditional graphics pipeline. Using a specialized architecture––dataflow computing––we combined consumer, industrial, and prototype components to create an integrated 1:1 room-scale VR system with a latency of under 3 ms. While this was prototype hardware, the considerations in achieving this performance inform the design of future VR pipelines, and our human factors studies have provided new and sometimes surprising contributions to the body of knowledge on latency in HCI.

中文翻译：

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数据流架构的低延迟渲染

近年来，由于低成本 COTS 组件的重新利用而引发了虚拟现实 (VR) 的复兴。VR 的目标是产生刺激，这些刺激似乎来自于传递它们的界面以外的来源。合成刺激取代了现实世界的刺激，并将用户传送到另一个可能是想象的“地方”。为此，我们必须克服许多挑战，通常与将合成刺激与现实世界的期望和行为相匹配有关。刺激失败的一种方式是它的延迟——用户操作和计算机响应之间的时间。我们构建了一个新颖的 VR 渲染器，优化延迟高于一切。我们的原型使我们能够探索延迟如何影响人机交互。我们不得不彻底重新考虑时间、空间、以及显示和传统图形管道中的同步。使用专门的架构——数据流计算——我们结合了消费、工业和原型组件，创建了一个集成的 1:1 房间规模的 VR 系统，延迟低于 3 毫秒。虽然这是原型硬件，但实现这种性能的考虑因素为未来 VR 管道的设计提供了信息，我们的人为因素研究为 HCI 中的延迟知识体系提供了新的、有时令人惊讶的贡献。