You know the sentence: lose track of time, maybe you also said it when you were so intent on doing something that you didn’t realize the minutes or hours went by. It is said to be the typical feeling of gamblers who underestimate the time spent at roulette or grappling with other challenges. Now a group of researchers, from the California University of Santa Cruz, has shown that it is more than a feeling: a true and measurable fact. And in their experiment has to do with virtual reality.
The experiment
The researchers, led by Professor Nicolas Davidenko, played eleven students from their own University in a competition (it was a question of being able to find the way out of a labyrinth) presented in two different versions: in the form of a normal video game or realized through virtual reality. All participants in the experiment tried both versions of the challenge and randomly chose who should start with the first and who with the second version of the game. All groups of players were asked to stop when they believed five minutes had passed. Well those who started with the game in virtual reality “underestimated” the time it took by over a minute, compared to those who started playing with a normal monitor .
The questions
What can this entail and why does it happen? According to the researchers, those who started playing in virtual reality had judged the time spent in front of the conventional monitor with the accelerated “criteria” of the first. And what would have happened if the second game was also in virtual mode? What if the observation times were longer? What kind of acceleration in the sense of time would we witness?
Explanations and assumptions
Most likely, the study authors explained, the observed phenomenon depends on the fact (or even the fact) that in virtual reality one tends to lose contact with one’s body of which you have, at most, only a schematic perception and with the “natural” clock represented by the heartbeat. This opens up disturbing prospects, but, researchers always say, if you want to use virtual reality for games you can minimize the risks, for example by making a clock appear at regular intervals during the game. But there is also the other side of the coin: there are actually moments in life when we would like time to pass faster than it actually does, for example when undergoing unpleasant medical treatments or more trivially during a long flight. And in this case, far from creepy, the time compression effect of being immersed in a virtual reality could prove to be very useful.
June 4, 2021 (change June 4, 2021 | 10:07 am)
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