Some Times Fly
The Effects of Engagement and Environmental Dynamics on Time Perception in Virtual Reality
Time is relative — not only in an Einsteinian sense, but also from a psychological perspective.
When you’re about to meet some old friends for a fun night out, a five-minute train delay to your favorite restaurant feels annoyingly long. But once you arrive, warm up with your friends, and finish half of your first drink, huge batches of those five-minute intervals disappear like snowflakes in the sun.
And it’s not just about emotions; a wide range of mostly interwoven factors influences how fast or slow we perceive the passage of time. For example, deep concentration and focus can cause us to lose track of time, so to speak. Body temperature is another factor: the hotter you feel, the faster time seems to pass! Age is yet another factor that continuously, permanently, and perhaps melancholically, changes the way we perceive the temporal length of an hour.
While time perception’s subjectivity can feel confusing, it has a silver lining: we can use it to our advantage. Perceiving time as dragging or racing against us has psychological implications that can affect our mental health, productivity, and interactions with others. So, if we can control it, we can potentially enhance our well-being in general. Imagine you have just an hour left to complete a project, and as you rush to finish, time seems to speed up, adding to your stress and creating a vicious cycle that makes it harder to work effectively. But what if, during such a time, you could put on glasses that make you feel time is slowing down? This could help you stay calm, reduce stress, and make better use of every remaining minute. But what kind of glasses could do that and how?
First, let’s answer the second question. We’ve already mentioned a few factors that influence our perception of time, such as age and body temperature. But if we want to make time feel like it’s passing faster, it’s hardly practical to age people or heat the room to boiling temperature! There are, however, more controllable factors we can use to modulate the perception of time, such as cognitive load and attention. We know that when someone is deeply focused, they lose track of time, feeling it pass faster. Additionally, when someone is exposed to new and surprising events and information, they experience a slower passage of time. So, how can we use these insights?
And that’s the answer to the first question: virtual reality (VR). In VR, we have firm control not only over sensory modalities like vision, hearing, and touch — with exciting work also underway to integrate taste and smell— but also over other perceptual mechanisms, such as depth perception, motion, and spatial awareness.
This empowers us to create immersive virtual environments that elicit realistic psychological responses from users. On top of that, having control over all these ways people perceive the world gives us a wide variety of channels to implement time perception modulations. For example, imagine a user engaged in a task within a virtual environment. If the task requires visual attention — where the user needs to look at something carefully — we can apply a time perception modulation through the auditory modality, such as playing a rhythmic pattern engineered to alter the perception of time. Alternatively, if the user is focused on listening, we could present a visual stimulus to influence their sense of time.
But first, we need to develop a robust set of time perception modulators for various sensory and perceptual channels, each carefully tailored for virtual reality. Our recent work at the VR/AR Lab at the University of Luxembourg is aimed precisely at this goal.
In this work, we tested the influence of two VR parameters on time perception: user engagement and environmental dynamics. We recruited participants, placed them in a virtual public park, and asked them to estimate how long they had spent there. We repeated this procedure under different conditions.
User engagement. In some trials, participants could see 3D models tracking their hand and arm movements, interact with the environment, and were positioned as if seated at a wooden table in the park. We labeled these trials as active user. In other trials, there was no hand tracking, participants had no interaction with the environment, and their field of view was elevated and limited, as if they were watching the park scene on a screen; these trials were labeled as passive user.
Environmental dynamics. Similarly, in some trials, we included animated avatars in the park, such as children playing and a jogger, along with spatial sounds like distant playground noise, car honks, or people talking. We labeled these type of environments as dynamic. When these features were absent, we labeled an environment as static.
After testing each condition in different spots, for different durations, we found some interesting patterns in how people perceived time in virtual environments.
Regardless of the environmental dynamics, active users felt they spent less time in virtual environments than they actually did. In contrast, passive users overestimated the duration of their presence in VR. However, the environmental dynamics was more subtle: on its own, it didn’t influence time perception much, but passive users in dynamic environments estimated their time in VR as significantly longer than it was. Interestingly, when comparing all possible pairs of conditions, this condition — passive user in a dynamic environment — showed the most significant difference compared to an active user in a static environment.
Simply put, this means that the more someone feels immersed in the virtual environment and the more physically engaged they are — especially in a focus-friendly environment — the shorter they estimate their time spent in VR. On the contrary, passive observers in a dynamic environment tend to feel that time has stretched longer than it actually is.
These results offer insights for designing intelligent user interfaces and adaptive virtual environments that are sensitive to time perception and capable of modulating it to improve users’ performance and well-being.
However, there is still much left to do, investigate, and understand. For example, we need to consider the role of emotions. While engagement influences time perception, whether people are enjoying this engagement or not, whether they are excited or calm, could completely change the effect, potentially making people to overestimate rather than underestimate durations.
Exploring these and much more is what we are doing in an EU-funded project; curious to learn more about the ChronoPilot project?
