Milliseconds are a budget.

Ask how much lag a VR teleoperation rig has and you will get one number, usually a hopeful one. The truthful answer is a ledger.

The headset samples your pose at 90 Hz, so pose capture costs about 11 ms before anything else happens. Encoding the stream costs a few more. Then the network takes whatever it takes: single digits on a wired LAN, twenty-something on clean 5G, hundreds on satellite. Decode, IK, and the motor command loop each shave off a couple more, and the mechanics of the arm itself need about 15 ms to actually settle where it was told to go. Seven line items. Only the network one is negotiable, which is why so much of production teleop engineering is really network engineering.

Somewhere around 120 ms the whole thing crosses a line that is easy to measure and hard to describe. Below it, the robot feels like your body: you stop thinking about commands and just reach. Above it, you are operating a machine again, correcting, waiting, overshooting. The presence threshold is not in any datasheet. You feel it leave.

I put an interactive version of this ledger on the robotics page: drag the operator hand and the G1 arm trails it by exactly the budget, so the lag stops being a number and becomes a distance you can see. Switch the link to satellite and watch 87 percent of the budget disappear into one line item, the only one you get to argue with.