a) Actual elapsed time (as opposed to “tape time”).

b) Displaying an image or responding to a user’s request almost simultaneously.

When you display an animation in real time, you perform the movements at the speed you made them in the animation. c) Computation or processing done in the present to control physical events occurring in the present. For example, when a digital effects system operator moves a joystick and the video images on the monitor appear to move simultaneously, the computations required to make the images move are said to have occurred in real time.