Measuring Time Delay Tolerance in Third-Person Live Commentary for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

This study proposes a methodology for measuring the acceptable delay tolerance for third-person game commentary. Third-person game commentary refers to commentary delivered by someone other than the player, with the role of helping viewers better understand the game and enhancing the viewing experience. With the recent advancement of AI, there has been increasing interest in automating such commentary using video understanding and audio generation. However, automating this process using video understanding and audio generation introduces delays, potentially affecting the naturalness of the commentary. In this context, since the extent to which such delays are acceptable to viewers remains unclear, we address this issue. The tolerance is modeled using an unnormalized Gaussian function. Through experiments on Super Smash Bros. Ultimate with 727 participants, we found that the average acceptable delay for this game is 3.71 seconds, with variations depending on different viewer attributes and gameplay contexts.