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by itishappy 958 days ago
> Considering you walk around and don’t have a problem with it...

I think humans are worse than this than you might think. Give it a try! Walk around and try to change directions on the fly, maybe have a friend shout suggestions to you. I can make maybe 2 or 3 adjustments per second, which gives about 400ms response time. That's about where RDR2 sits, and players criticized it for being unresponsive.

2 comments

Tangential but a lot of sports drills are along these lines.

A great tennis drill is when your coach hits the ball to you and randomly yells "LEFT!" "RIGHT!" or "MIDDLE!" after you've begun your swing. Then you have to hit the ball in that direction. Helps hone your reaction time and helps you to have a "neutral" swing that doesn't telegraph your intentions to an opponent.

One can imagine variations in many sports.

But if you take 400ms to respond, and the game takes 400ms to respond after that, the actual response delay is 800ms, which is quite a lot.
People take ~150 ms to react and press a key, the ~400ms in running/walking is because you need to first shift your feet into a new orientation and let gravity change your momentum. The physical distance signals need to travel down the length of your spine, and the need to move your feet is larger distance before any change can occur etc.

Watch a sprinting football player dodge. Their feet go in the opposite direction as they want to move the same way you move an inverted pendulum. If you want the top of an inverted pendulum to move left you move your hand to the right. It still looks very fast because you don’t see the initial ~200ms delay between deciding to doge and the point when their feet start to respond.

Most martial arts will teach their own type of footwork optimized for the style, but it’s common to use a shuffling motion which keeps people’s feet close to the ground. It allows for a more rapid change in direction but is slower and less effective than normal walking if you actually want to get somewhere. Fencing and Kendo want more mobility where wrestling and Judo wants more stability etc.

Likely not solvable until we have a BCI working.