Low-latency interaction through choice-points, buffering, and cuts in Tactus

Multimedia streams usually require prefetching and buffering to ensure steady, glitch-free delivery to audio and video displays, but buffering causes undesirable latency. This latency may be manifested as startup delays, glitches, dropouts, and loss of synchronization. In interactive media presentations where there are a small number of choices, alternative streams can be prefetched to reduce latency. This technique is supported by the Tactus system, which manages the computation and synchronization of multimedia data. Tactus offers a systematic approach to prefetching, precomputation, choice points, and synchronous cuts. Tactus consists of an object-oriented client toolkit for media generation and a synchronization server for media presentation