This time compression effect was observed only among participants who played the game in virtual reality first. In other words, students played for 28.5 percent more time than they realized in virtual reality, compared to conventional formats. The study found that participants who played the virtual reality version of the game first played for an average of 72.6 seconds longer before feeling that five minutes had passed than students who started on a conventional monitor. Researchers recorded the actual amount of time that had passed when each participant stopped playing the game, and this revealed a gap between participants’ perception of time and the reality. Prior studies of time perception in virtual reality have often asked participants about their experiences after the fact, but in this experiment, the research team wanted to integrate a time-keeping task into the virtual reality experience in order to capture what was happening in the moment. Since there were no clocks available, each person had to make this estimate based on their own perception of the passage of time. Participants were asked to stop playing the game whenever they felt like five minutes had passed.
Both versions were essentially the same, but the mazes in each varied slightly so that there was no repetition between formats. Participants played in both formats, with researchers randomizing which version of the game each student started with. Mullen designed a maze game that could be played in both virtual reality and conventional formats, then the research team recruited 41 UC Santa Cruz undergraduate students to test the game. The results are now published in the journal Timing & Time Perception.
Grayson Mullen, who was a cognitive science undergraduate at the time, worked with Psychology Professor Nicolas Davidenko to design an experiment that tested how virtual reality’s effects on a game player’s sense of time differ from those of conventional monitors. Psychology researchers at UC Santa Cruz have found that playing games in virtual reality creates an effect called “time compression,” where time goes by faster than you think.
0 kommentar(er)
