Low-Latency Interaction through Choice-Points, Buffering, and Cuts in Tactus

Multimedia streams usually require prefetching and buffering to ens’ure steady, glitch-fnee d e h e r y to audio and video displays, but buffering ca’uses undesirable latency. This latency may be manifested as startup delays, glitches, dropouts, and loss of synchronization. I n interactive media presentations .where there are a small number of choices, alternative streams can be prefetched to reduce latency. This technique is supported b y the Tactus system, which manages the computation and synchronization of multimedia data. Tactus offers a systematic approach to prefetching, precomputation, choice points, and synchronous c,uts. Tactus consists of an object-oriented client toolkit for media generation and a synchronization seruer for media presentation.