The article says in the abstract, about differences in distance, speed, and spatial relations between Virtual reality environments and the natural world and how they have been observed in experiments, but how time works within these experiences hasn’t been considered. It’s unknown whether time is expanded or contracted within virtual reality experiences.
It also discusses that the brain will often seek for the time within these virtual reality experiences on internal biological or psychological events or external signals. Such as sunlight, or tiredness. This in turn means that in virtual reality the designer can alter the prospects of time for the player by changing external signals that the body relies on for confirmation of time.
There are also no established measures on how to best assess time judgments in VR. Which makes it difficult to analyse and measure accurately the differences between real life and VR.
In an experiment, participants were given a space to walk in, while wearing a VR helmet and asked once they reached the end of the space how long they felt it took them. On average they felt it was 2.6 seconds shorter than the actual time it took. The article doesn’t speak on whether this was correctly done or if this is a good or bad thing. I think it’s mainly pointing out a phenomenon that requires further studies to analyse a bit more. But it’s an interesting point of VR that I hadn’t considered, how we can alter time and space and change the feeling of time is something powerful. Now I consider how we could possibly do this with sound? Music can make time feel like its going faster if you listen to an album you enjoy, so how can we also implement this phenomenon into a virtual reality space?