Healing Cracks in Cyberspace: towards best practice

Abstract

As we move firmly into the digital age, navigation through cyberspace has become an increasingly ubiquitous form of human-computer interaction. Whether the application we use is geospatial, flight simulation, virtual reality, augmented reality, simulation or game; we rely on sophisticated computation to paint data into views we can understand. 3D images and video with moving perspectives allow rapid navigation and assimilation of information. However, despite all the sophistication of modern technology, we have inadvertently programmed random cracks into cyberspace leading to positional jitter. Positional jitter can present as: random motion, rendering errors, physics errors and imprecise interaction. This unintended numerical error, and its mitigation, has been a focus of research and development over that past 2 decades. A review of mitigation methods has revealed differences in the quality, complexity and performance of implementations and some ad-hoc approaches to designing for sufficient quality. To help move research and development towards a consensus solution, this paper reviews and evaluates different approaches. New metrics to estimate error and quality are presented. A simple and efficient method to minimising positional jitter, that will benefit scientific and engineering calculations sensitive to error and achieve the best performance and quality for general applications, is recommended.