TWC9: IE 9 PP3, Windows Live Essentials Beta, God's Own Machine

The Discussion

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  The video is a podcast?

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  Dan, you're usually eager to get to the tips of the week, that I'm not amused you forgot twice. It better be a couple of damn fine tips, or we'll digitally disown you.  You'll never work in show business again. 

  What's a suitable penance?  Only code in J# for a week.

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  I've been interested in knowing just how much latency there is when using a Windows Phone 7 device as a remote like that Media Center example or the T-Shirt Canon.

  I'm assuming it would be possible to have a knob or slider on the phone send info about it's position to an app on a computer that has the same controls so they move at the same time then have the computer send back the information to the phone and measure how many milliseconds it took for the whole process.

   

  Touch OSC seems to react remarkably fast for example.

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  @Kryptos - What do you mean?

   

  @Adam - I didn't forget this time, I just didn't know I had to bring two picks of the week this week. *Please* don't make me code in J#, if I do that, the user base will double

   

   

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  Since the command is over HTTP, there are a couple of things you have to factor in - connection type, throughput (what are you sending), network traffic, how many commands you're sending, etc. Since our cannon was using accelerometer changes and since the accelerometer was firing ~50-60x/second, we added a filter to only fire 10x/second, and the time to build a http request and send it was pretty fast where you felt like driving it was responsive (maybe 150ms total)? The one thing I'd call out is that the initial lookup took a little more time as it would do a lookup via name (ex: http://betty/) instead of via IP address, but after that it was pretty fast. For TV, I think the only pain is that for things like HD channels, the TV takes a little bit of time to load the channel so it may feel a bit more sluggish than it actually is.

   

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  Yup, for Media Center, changing channels is probably the bottleneck so I doubt the latency of the whole setup would be noticeable at all.

   

  For controlling anything music related it's really not acceptable to have latencies above what your standard game controller would have so it would probably need to be done slightly differently (more like the wayTouchOSC communicates with OSCulator).

  TouchOSC works on iPhone and will be available on iPad and Android soon but I have a feeling they're just going to ignore Windows Phone 7.

   

  I know it's possible to get completely un-noticeable latencies with an XBOX 360 controller because I've controlled MIDI devices with one before with the help of a little GlovePIE script I made which translates game controller info (usually Wii-Motes but it works with any kind of controller) into MIDI and sends to to a virtual midi port.

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  Best line of the week: "It's funny because you're fired."

   

  LOL