Xárene Eskandar is an artist who has been exploring representations of time through the mediums of film and photography for many years, and she’s has been starting to design VR experiences that alter the user’s perception of time based upon insights from cognitive science research. She’s also a Ph.D. candidate at UC Santa Barabara Department of Media, Arts, & Technology, and she was presenting a paper titled “Aesthetics of temporal perception and scale in virtual reality” at the Experiential Technology & Neurogaming Conference in San Francisco in May. I had a chance to catch up with Xárene to talk about filmmakers Béla Tarr & Andrei Tarkovsky’s experiments in time perception, as well as the cognitive science research into why awe, self-regulation, and The Extended Now impacts time perception.
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Here’s Xárene’s poster titled “Aesthetics of temporal perception and scale in virtual reality”:
Filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky wrote a book titled “Sculpting in Time” where he argues that people go to see films in order to experience time, and that the role of a director is to sculpt the time that the audience experiences:
What is the essence of the director’s work? We could define it as sculpting in time. Just as a sculptor takes a lump of marble, and, inwardly conscious of the features of his finished piece, removes everything that is not part of it—so the film-maker, from a ‘lump of time’ made up of an enormous, solid cluster of living facts, cuts off and discards whatever he does not need, leaving only what is to be an element of the finished film, what will prove to be integral to the cinematic image.
Here’s the opening scene of Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, which feels about 2-3 times longer than the actual run time.
And here are two of the potato peeling scenes in Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse that also give an expanded sense of time:
For more Voices of VR interviews about time perception and time dilation in VR, then be sure to check out my interviews with Gerd Bruder, Owlchemy Labs, Karl Krantz, and Sarah Northway.
Below are some links and excerpts from some of the cognitive science research that Xárene cites.
Rudd, Vohs, and Aaker connect awe and time perception in their paper titled “Awe Expands People’s Perception of Time, Alters Decision Making, and Enhances Well-Being”
Two psychological theories are also relevant. The first involves the extended-now theory (Vohs & Schmeichel, 2003), which suggests focusing on the present moment elongates time perception. Awe captivates people’s attention on what is unfolding before them, which the extended-now theory predicts would expand the perception of time. The second is Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (SST), which posits that people are motivated to acquire new knowledge when time feels expansive (Carstensen, Isaacowitz, & Charles, 1999). Awe triggers in people a desire to make new knowledge structures (Keltner & Haidt, 2003). Thus, a speculative suggestion from SST is that awe’s ability to stimulate the creation of mental schemas may be a signal that the mind perceives an expanded amount of time in response to awe.
Rudd, Vohs, and Aaker also provide a specific definition of awe with references to previous research on the topic:
One, awe involves perceptual vastness, which is the sense one has come upon something immense in size, number, scope, complexity, ability, or social bearing (e.g., fame, authority). Two, awe stimulates a need for accommodation, meaning it alters one’s understanding of the world (Keltner & Haidt, 2003)… Experiences involving awe, such as optimal athletic performances (Ravizza, 1977), peak experiences (Maslow, 1964), and spiritual or mystical events (Fredrickson & Anderson, 1999), often also involve a sense of timelessness (Csikszentmihalyi & Hunter, 2003). The phenomenology of awe, therefore, suggests it might expand perceptions of time.
Vohs & Schmeichel make the argument that “regulating the self can elongate the felt duration of time” in their paper titled “Self-Regulation and the Extended Now: Controlling the Self Alters the Subjective Experience of Time.” They define self-regulation as “operations by the self to alter its own habitual or unwanted responses to achieve a conscious or nonconscious goal.”
Because people who are self-regulating tend to monitor their behavior (Baumeister, Heatherton, & Tice, 1994), they are likely to be attuned to the passage of time (“How long has it been?”). These monitoring responses and resultant attention to time are not found among people who are not regulating. Stated simply, it is likely that the act of self-regulation is associated with close attention to time.
Does our conscious perception have framerate? It turns out that according to the model of Herzog, Kammer, & Scharnowski that it does. They say that our perceptions show signs that they’re “quasi-continuously and unconsciously analyzed with high temporal resolution” and that “consciousness arises only in time intervals of up to 400 milliseconds, with gaps of unconsciousness in between.” They elaborate on their model within their paper titled “Time Slices: What Is the Duration of a Percept?.”
Even though we may only be synthesizing all of the unconscious streams of perceptual input every 50ms to 400ms, our ability to detect discrete changes across different senses differs across the different senses:
Whereas two clicks can already be separated if they are only 1–3 ms apart [33], two taps need to be about 10 ms apart [33], and two flashes about 25 ms [34]. However, for trains of stimuli, the presentation rate at which the sensation of flicker ceases is similar for the visual and auditory systems, i.e., at around 16 ms inter-stimulus-interval (ISI) [35,36].
Finally, The Atlantic did a profile on Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, titled The Case Against Reality, A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses. Our perception of time and reality has been shaped by many thousands of years of evolution of our senses by interacting with the real world.
After reading this profile about Donald D. Hoffman, then it’s really started to make me question the underlying fabric of our reality, and how much we’ve trained ourselves to completely ignore. Does VR have the capacity to provide virtual experiences that requires our perceptual systems to evolve before its ready to receive them?
Virtual reality is uniquely poised to serve as a medium to continue to explore the nature of time perception and our perception of reality. There’s still a lot to learn, and this cognitive science research into awe and self-regulation is providing a lot of different ways to start putting these theories into practice.
UPDATE: Xárene wanted to make the following clarification:
I meant to say that there is not any research that relates body scale to time perception rather than time perception research in VR doesn’t exist. Specifically, there’s 2D research where the movement of a dot is used for the perception of duration, or the movement of the sun, and we accept those objects scaling on the screen but not relative to our body scale. What if instead we view those objects the same size relative to each other with the body scaling to bring them to their correctly understood scale? Then what is the relationship of the scaling body with time and how is duration perceived?In psychology research where the scale of the body is studied, it is studied as a mental disorder, such as Alice in Wonderland syndrome or body dysmorphic disorder. So any view of the body other than what is considered ‘normal’ is a disorder. I’m looking for research that acknowledges that our body exists in different scales just as time and space have different scales. This discussion also brings up another topic on how the trans body is seen.
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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. I've had different episodes about this phenomena that happens in VR, which is time dilation, where you may think you've only spent two or three hours in VR, but it's actually been 12 hours that have passed. And so this whole concept of time perception and time dilation, there's something that's really going on in VR that we don't fully quite understand yet. And so on today's episode, I talked to Zarin Eskandar, who is a filmmaker and photographer who's been looking at how time perception works in the film and photography mediums and is starting to design some experiences within VR that starts to try to answer some of these questions about what's happening with our time perception. And so she's drawing upon some cognitive science research in order to inspire her work that includes how awe and self-regulation impacts our perception of time. So that's what we'll be covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. But first, a quick word from our sponsor. Today's episode is brought to you by Unity. Unity is a great way to get involved into virtual reality development, even if you don't want to become an expert on every dimension of creating a VR experience. The Unity Asset Store has a lot of different 3D models and scripts to get you started. For example, Technolust's Blair Reneau has won artistic achievement awards using a lot of the assets from the Unity Store. I'm not actually doing a lot of modeling and art for the game. It's a lot of kit bashing, taking Unity assets, tearing them apart, and putting them back together. Get started in helping make your VR dreams come true with Unity and the Unity Asset Store. And so this interview with Zarin happened at the Experiential Technology and Neurogaming Conference and Expo that happened on May 17 at the Metreon in San Francisco. And Zarin was presenting a poster titled Aesthetics of Temporal Perception and Scale in Virtual Reality. And so with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:08.540] Xarene Eskandar: I'm Zarin Eskandar. I am a PhD candidate at UC Santa Barbara, Department of Media Arts and Technology. I run my own studio, Atelier XC in Los Angeles and Reykjavik, Iceland. I am interested in time perception and very specifically how we understand the scale of our body and how it shifts when our temporal and spatial perception is altered. and VR allows an alternate reality and then bringing that back to this reality and looking at what's missing from this world, what's tied to our perception and an embodiment in reality that we're able to break the barrier in virtual reality and looking at how do we bridge that back here and solve perceptual problems that we are having here. There's probably things in Quantum mechanics that we can't figure out because we're tied to a certain way of understanding space and understanding time that's tied to our perception That's tied to our body here and VR allows you to break those barriers and figure things out differently So that's what I'm interested in is and particularly looking at time and how to alter that how to experience that Differently than the linear time goes forward and doesn't go backward but in VR you can experience it in any direction and
[00:03:27.401] Kent Bye: And so we're here at the Experiential Technology and Neurogaming Conference. And so you have a poster here talking about some of your research and what you're looking at in terms of time perception. And so first of all, I'm curious, like, what is the connection to cognitive science that you've looked at in terms of what do we know about our perception of time?
[00:03:47.378] Xarene Eskandar: Cognitive science has done pretty extensive research on our perception of distance and duration, how we understand how much time has passed, how we understand movement in relation to time and space and all those things. So what I have done in this research is looking at how time is dealt with in film, very particularly with Tarkovsky and Tar. Tarkovsky is the sacrifice and Bellatar is the Turin horse, which are known for very long scenes. One is with a camera that's moving at the same pace as if you're walking. It's walking pace. The other one's static and the Action in both scenes is real-time, so I'm looking at how we experience through this medium of cinema, how do we get immersed in that scene and experience the time of those scenes with real-time activity. And looking at, well, when we're in VR, we're in another medium, this time full immersion, full body immersion in another medium, experiencing time in very specific ways.
[00:04:53.597] Kent Bye: So you have these two different scenes from film and you say that people perceive them as being really long. Is that because they are actually long or is there something very specific about what they're doing in the scene when you talk about the active versus passive cinema?
[00:05:07.905] Xarene Eskandar: The scenes are long. The opening scene from The Sacrifice is about 10 minutes. The potato scenes, as I call them, I very specifically isolated the scenes in Belatar's Natorian Horse, where they're eating potatoes. And those are anywhere of five, six, seven minutes long. The reason that they feel even longer is that you're actively engaged in the scene. They're happening without any edit cuts. The action in the film is real time. And you can almost peel and eat the potato in time with the actors. And that is rooted in cognitive psychology research from Vosen Schmeichel from 2003 that What elongates the time is actively being engaged in a scene by regulating your emotions or regulating your behavior. So self-regulatory behavior extends the perception of time. And that's what's happening in these films. And in VR that same thing is happening. You're very actively engaged in a scene. You're directing the scene as well as acting in the scene and that level of engagement extends the time. So there is this dilation that is commented on that a very long amount of hours of time feels a lot less but within that very little time you're also there's nested times of various durations so say for example that you were in VR for 12 hours and it felt like three hours your own previous podcast Within that three hour felt time you could have easily experienced times that felt even longer or even shorter and it all depends on that level of engagement that's been in it. So I'm really interested in how time is layered and one is nested within the other and you're experiencing multiple time scales at the same time.
[00:06:54.541] Kent Bye: That's really interesting. And well, just to kind of unpack one thing that you said, that self-regulating behavior alters your time perception experience. So what is the definition of self-regulation and why is that connected to time perception?
[00:07:08.467] Xarene Eskandar: Self-regulation is when you're actively making decisions in a scene and by doing so you're also taking account of time. We have an understanding of how long certain things take and so now moments, instead of moments just passing by and you're not taking any account for it, you start paying attention to the time that's passing. You're taking it into account and that's what makes it feel longer. This is kind of this prior knowledge of knowing how long things take and starting to think about what you did.
[00:07:40.106] Kent Bye: That's interesting because it sounds like there's many different reference points that we're using in our environment to be able to Have some sort of estimation of the time that's passing and one of the things that one of the researchers that I interviewed about time perception Gerd Bruder he said that cognitive load is one of the big factors of time perception that the more active your brain is then the the less capacity it has to notice all these different cues. Or if you start to alter these cues, whether it's the sun moving, or perhaps if you start to mess with gravity and move things in slow motion, then I would imagine that there's all sorts of different things within VR that exceeds our expectations for how the world is supposed to work, because we're putting people into these fantasy worlds where they really don't know what to expect, and so they really don't have any type of reference as to how much time is passing.
[00:08:29.700] Xarene Eskandar: Yeah, that's true. I'm not a cognitive scientist, so I am very specifically looking at real environments and real behavior, video environment as well, real scenarios, and without any visual effects, altering those. That already sets up your expectations when you're in a real environment. In the case of my work, it's video and photography. So you're already starting with expectations of how things should work. and then once I alter what you expect to what you don't expect and then I'm interested to see how do you shift the perception of your body in order to experience that.
[00:09:11.128] Kent Bye: Within VR, you can start to do things that transcend anything we've ever experienced before. And by doing that, we are kind of breaking down all of those lessons and patterns that we've learned from life that give us some indication for how much time is passing. By doing that, then VR creates this wonderland that we're able to really break down those expectations, but also create these really extreme cases of time dilation where someone may be in VR for what feels like three hours, but may actually be 12 hours.
[00:09:43.463] Xarene Eskandar: Yeah, absolutely, and that's what I'm interested in. I think that's what is exciting for many people, is that you can completely break down what reality is in VR, and yet it is a reality. You are experiencing it, you are in there, and to see what happens when you bring that back out, and when these realities start blurring, one becomes the other.
[00:10:06.663] Kent Bye: And maybe you could expand on this concept of nested time a little bit and maybe give some examples or metaphors to kind of break that down for what exactly you mean about this concept of nested time.
[00:10:18.507] Xarene Eskandar: Well, looking at, if we take all the, for example, what I have here is one scene, one of the potato scenes, where Olsdorfer and his daughter are eating potatoes at different speeds. She's eating it slow and he's eating it really fast. And I'm taking, I don't know how many frames a second I take from the scene and layer them to see what is the time scale. the many timescales that are in that scene that are happening at the same time. So it's one scene, but there's at least two speeds happening within it. One for the daughter, one for the father, and then there's a third speed of the speed of view, the observer of that scene. So that's a very simplified way of, you know, looking at at least three timescales nested within one experience. with other work that I have or from the other example I have of Camille Utterback's work is looking at more time scales all layered on top of each other and experienced simultaneously in one scene. And in the final example of my own work from the Clocksmith's Labyrinth is 24 hours of time all on top of each other and looking at time as a fluid, as a volume, a fluid volume that you can navigate through. So all of time being present at once and you experiencing it rather than the moment by moment experience of time we're forced to go through in life. It's just the nature of time and us. But also looking at how the other side that I'm looking at, at this nesting of time, is taking the word dilation, very literally time dilation, and looking at how we use spatial metaphors to understand time. We say move the meeting forward or move the meeting up. We're using spatial metaphors to give an idea of time. So dilation itself, and this is something I've done in previous work with sun up and sun down, and looking at what does sun up and sun down actually look like if it's going up in one line and coming down in one line, and what kind of body do I have to be to experience that? So with dilation, I'm doing the same thing. If that's like an aperture that's opening and closing, it's dilating. That means that there's many, many nested times that are happening concentrically and opening and closing and I'm at the center of that. So now what does that feel like? What does that look like? What does that sound like? So nesting times is looking at all the different scales of time on top of each other experienced simultaneously. And then how does that affect your perception of your body in that?
[00:12:59.137] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's really interesting to think about different scales of time happening simultaneously. I mean, you can even look at, like, the course of a second is within a context of an hour, is within the context of a day, is within the context of a year. So there's different cycles of even the Sun going up and down around for 24 hours, but yet the Moon takes 27, 28 days to do a full rotation. We're in the context of one cycle, but yet there's other cycles that are happening at the same time. And you can get a sense of the context of what part of the month you're in by looking at the moon, but what part of the day you're in by looking at the sun.
[00:13:35.387] Xarene Eskandar: And there's scales that time doesn't even matter. There's infinitely small scales where time doesn't even exist. So just that in itself, I think, raises the best question. Is time real? Is it something we've completely made up and putting all this effort into understanding and we completely made it up? When it doesn't exist at tiny scales.
[00:13:55.873] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, you know, speaking of scale, you know, it kind of brings this point back to the size of the observer, you know, because right now we're in a human body at a human scale. And I think that when you think about Einstein's relativity theory, he's basically making this connection between space and time and how they're intimately connected and that we already have these different underestimation of space within VR, up to 20% sometimes. And so there's also different underestimation of speed when you're in VR. So there's this connection between space and speed and over distance and also as time as we're in this. So it feels like scale and physical space could actually be intimately connected to our perception of time. And so you've talked a little bit about changing the scale of the human perception. So what are some of your thoughts in terms of our perception of time from our bias as a human scale?
[00:14:51.423] Xarene Eskandar: Well, there's definitely research in cognitive sciences on our perception of distance and duration, as well as how movement affects our perceptions of distance and duration. And it's all 2D. And what I am doing now is repeating that research, done by very well-regarded scientists, of course, But repeating that and repeating that in VR, I don't have an answer for it. I don't think anyone has an answer because the research just isn't there. We're all speculating on it. But just working from the aesthetic side as an artist, and that's what I am, I work from the aesthetic side and look at what is affecting my perception of my body. And definitely our perception of distance and duration, of the scale of a space, of distance, How the Sun is moving across the sky and all these things do affect how you also see yourself in space How you understand your being in space?
[00:15:48.260] Kent Bye: And so how are you applying this in terms of your art because you know, you're also a filmmaker You've created some films about this but also some VR experiences And so what types of things are you ultimately trying to either experience or explore through this work?
[00:16:05.026] Xarene Eskandar: One of my very first interests was what happens if I experience all of time at once. And photography is one of the first technologies that allowed us to visually experience time, displaced time. So that's where I started was with photography and creating photographs with all of time. Well, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. time, sunrise to sunset time. all present in one image. What came out of that was what I call moments becoming events, where passing moments becomes an expanded now. And this has led to other research that I did on just photography becoming as a result of experiencing simultaneous time, photography becoming a tool for data visualization, drawing on Richard Tufte's small multiples and suddenly things that we would not see because of the passing moments suddenly becoming present in one space at one time. And we start seeing patterns emerge and information and knowledge as a result coming out of that. After exploring this photographically, I did it in film, and I explored this time in film with drawing on language, looking at how we form our understanding of time from spatial metaphors, so the sun up and sun down, and making a film that's without any special effects, just four hours in Iceland, shooting from sunrise to sunset, but just making the path of the sun go up and come down. and to see what happens when I experience that. What kind of body do I even have to be to experience that kind of a movement of time? Because another way that we understand time and distance is, of course, the sun, how the sun moves across the sky. And in some environments, for those of us who've never lived in a place like Iceland, where the path of the sun is almost a complete circle or barely rises, it completely messes our understanding of time, especially for those of us who are living in these temperate zones of around, like, 34 degrees on the planet, about 10, 12-hour days. So it really messes how we start experiencing time, these simple things. And so the last film that I made, which was driving at the speed of the Nordic sun, and taking all of these previous works into my research in VR is the next piece with all 24 hours present as a fluid volume to navigate and walk through. So time isn't just happening one directional and asymmetric. It's happening in any direction and multi-directional and symmetric or asymmetric. I don't have any results yet because we have to go through it and see what happens. How do we experience time? How do we experience ourselves?
[00:18:55.064] Kent Bye: On your poster here you mentioned this concept of the extended now and I'm curious like what does that mean and how does that apply to this?
[00:19:02.523] Xarene Eskandar: The extended now is, I mean, there's a few different, in music they talk about this, and cognitive scientists talk about this as well, and there's various reasons that they associate to it. So, for example, with Bose and Schmeichel, they talk about self-regulation leading to an extended now. With more recent research by Rudd is the sensation of awe. and how that extends time. So there's many different processes going on and how time stops for us at moments or what makes time go suddenly faster. Extended now isn't my concept, it's coming from those research, but it is something that, again, aesthetically I've been after and looking at what does make a small amount of time feel like a lot of time.
[00:19:48.507] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's an author and researcher named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who writes about flow and achieving flow states and I imagine that in VR we're able to have this high engagement where we have this high amount of self-regulation maybe perhaps or also this wonder and awe that is being invoked by the magical exceeding of any of our expectations of being in VR. And so it seems like all of these things are adding up to having some impact on our sense of time and our time perception so that as VR designers, we're trying to really understand what these components are so that as we create experiences, we can either extend or compress someone's sense of time.
[00:20:29.425] Xarene Eskandar: Yeah, all of this is coming to that there needs to be more research in VR, specifically in VR. And we're drawing from research that's done in 2D images, literally people being shown photographs and sketches or looking on screens or watching films. There is no research in VR and that's some of where my research is taking place is is in VR trying to Start again not being a scientist. I'm still coming from you know the aesthetic side of it But yeah, all of this is just pointing out to that there needs to be research in VR about VR just taking the well-referenced research that's coming and repeating it in VR and see what does this mean and I'm not exactly, by the way, familiar with flow. What is flow?
[00:21:19.626] Kent Bye: Well, flow is just the state that people get in where they feel like they're not thinking about it. They're just using their intuition and reacting. And it's something that sports athletes get into a lot of, or creative people, that once you get into the flow, it's like you just feel like time just goes by in a snap of a finger. But you get into this kind of altered state of really being at high performance.
[00:21:43.621] Xarene Eskandar: Well, that's what interests me, is that we think time is flying by, and that's going back to the nested time, that within that time going by, there's going to be moments that are going to be even longer than the amount of time that you felt went by really fast.
[00:21:59.906] Kent Bye: Yeah, yeah. So, well, just to kind of wrap things up here, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on what you think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable.
[00:22:12.071] Xarene Eskandar: My dream, I can say what my ultimate dream from VR is, is that I want some cosmological puzzle that is stuck to our earth bound body and perception to get unlocked because we're able to perceive beyond that. I think we'll figure that out.
[00:22:36.496] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
[00:22:38.217] Xarene Eskandar: Thank you.
[00:22:39.494] Kent Bye: So that was Zarin Eskandar, who is a PhD candidate at UC Santa Barbara in the Department of Media Arts and Technology, and she's also a photographer and filmmaker. So there's a lot of different takeaways from this episode and Overall, I think that the relationship between virtuality and time is something that is going to be really super interesting to look at and see how this evolves. First of all, I did do a recent interview with Gerard Bruder, who was looking at different components of what they call Zeitgebers, which is essentially different cues that are in the environment that help you determine how much time is passing. So for example, the movement of the sun across the sky is one Zeitgeber, which is telling you how much time is passing. So if you slow down the sun or speed it up, it's going to either expand or contract your sense of time. So I think the interesting thing is that overall in VR, we're removing all of these environmental cues that we're getting about how much time is passing. And so when we go into VR, we're kind of being able to add these back in and start to really isolate and experiment with the impacts of each of these different cues, which in real reality, we don't have much control over. So it'll be interesting to see what kind of insights about these Zeitgebers come about So another really interesting insights in this interview is just about looking at what film and photography can start to teach us about time perception, you know, whether it's time-lapse video or these two specific filmmakers, Belotar with the Turin Horse, as well as Andrei Tartakovsky with The Sacrifice. So I actually tracked down these two clips that Zarin was talking about and watched them and they do feel like They're really long time. I mean, we're used to watching films that have a lot of different cuts So to watch something that is just letting the scene unfold it does make it feel like the scene is at least two or three times longer than it actually is and Tarkovsky actually had a really interesting book called sculpting in time which he kind of has this idea that filmmakers are actually giving the audience, this experience of time, and that the director's job is actually to sculpt the time that the audience experiences. They're going in and cutting out all the different things that are kind of boring or not essential, and they're really just giving you the essence of an overall experience and story. And so the other big points that Zerreen was pulling in here is some other research into time perception, one of the things which is awe. You know, whenever people are in this state of awe, it alters their sense of time. And just to kind of define what awe is, you know, in this paper, it says awe involves perceptual vastness, which is the sense one has come upon sensing something immense in size, number, scope, complexity, ability, or social bearing. And also all stimulates a need for accommodation, meaning it can really alter your understanding of the world. So anything that's really kind of causing this paradigm shift or showing you this vast experience of beauty that just takes your breath away, you can just kind of think about the moments that you've had in your life where you've experienced all. And you can start to see how virtual reality is able to give people an experience that starts to give them things that they've never been able to see before. And so with this state of awe, it's going to start to really, really have these high levels of time dilation. Another aspect of cognitive science is this concept of the extended now, which is kind of a really Buddhist concept if you think about it. It's essentially you just paying attention to your body and focusing on what's happening within your body. So in meditation and Buddhist practices, it's focusing on your breath. And for anybody that's done meditation and tried to really just put your focus on the breath, your perception of time gets super expanded. And so some of these experiments into measuring the impact of self-regulation within your perception of time, they had people try to watch an emotional movie and suppress their emotions. So they're constantly having to try to regulate and pay attention to their emotions and actually try to control them. So this self-regulating behavior actually causes huge shifts in time perception. So it'll be interesting to see how VR designers are able to perhaps use that to their advantage if they're trying to do something very specific with either expanding or contracting the sense of time. So there's also this connection between space, physical space, and time, but also our kind of concept and perception of reality. You know, there's this really interesting article that was in the Atlantic Monthly that was titled, The Case Against Reality. A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one that we experience through our senses. And so in this article, it talks to David Hoffman, who's a professor of cognitive science at the University of California. And he's basically making this argument that what we're perceiving of reality is just these high-level metaphors that are abstracted sense of just getting down to the true essence of what we really need to just pay attention to. And that there's all these low-level details about reality that we just, our minds have just, over time, have decided to kind of just filter out, and that we don't see them at all. And so yet, in virtual reality, we're starting to go and recreate this entire sense of reality. So you hear a lot of things about the certain level of motion to photon latency of less than 20 milliseconds in order to kind of trick your perceptual system. And there's all these different numbers. And there's a number that really jumped out to me with a recent article that came out. It's called Time Slices. What is the duration of a percept? So essentially, what they're arguing is that And just like there's a frame rate at 90 frames per second, there's a frame rate of our unconscious aggregation of all the different signals that kind of crystallizes in this time slice. And they say that could vary between 50 to 400 milliseconds, which, if you think about it, is pretty remarkable because we can perceive all sorts of different changes that are below that. For example, in terms of sound, we can hear two clicks that are only one to three milliseconds apart. In terms of touch, we can feel two taps that are about 10 milliseconds apart. And visual, our visual input, we can see flashes that are about 25 milliseconds apart. But in terms of like combining these two together, you know, seeing a flash and then hearing the sound since, you know, light travels faster. that those need to be synced around like 16 milliseconds in the interstimulus interval so in other words you know you can be watching a movie and if the sound is out of sync and you just sort of like see this dubbed effect where the sound is not synced you we can start to see that misperception there's a certain threshold that they've been able to measure which is about 16 milliseconds or so, but all of that is just sort of happening at this unconscious level in that our minds are like every 400 seconds kind of cohering a mental model of what's actually happening in reality at like only like 400 milliseconds at the maximum. It may range from like 80 milliseconds to 400. I've seen different numbers, but The point is, is that there's all sorts of like unconscious processing that is going on and what we're kind of constantly reconstructing these time slices of reality as we're perceiving what's happening in the world. So I think what's going to start to happen with virtual reality is that we're going to be able to start to play with that. I mean, there's only so much that we can change real reality. I mean, we actually can't really change it that fast of a speed. So what's it going to be like when we go into a VR experience and start to try to experiment with almost like this sensory overload of like changing the scene at faster than our perceptual precepts and time slices can consciously or even unconsciously really process into something coherent you know what's that going to do is it going to be something that's really chaotic or is it going to be sort of like this inverse sensory deprivation and going into this sensory overload where it's going to be perhaps very disruptive or perhaps very zen-like and meditative because it's going to break through this construction of reality that we've seen our entire life and we're able to see the world as it really is and we're able to train ourselves to see beyond the illusion of the reality that we're constructing in our minds according to the theory of Donald Hoffman. you know, actually a lot of mystical traditions that might say something very similar. So this whole concept of time perception or perception of reality, I think like at the deep philosophical level, there may be some really huge implications of what we're able to do at a technological level to start to experiment with our perception of time and how we start to play with that. When we see the world there are things that move so slowly that we can't see those changes but yet using time-lapse photography and we're able to capture a snapshot over the course of a day or a month or many years and start to see plants grow or the glaciers melt or the sun move through the sky or the stars circle around us in the night sky And when we start to step into an immersive virtual reality experience and start to really be immersed in these kind of time-lapse types of experiences that are really changing our perception of time, I think it's going to have a pretty profound impact of awe and wonder. So with that, I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to spend this time with me talking about the nature of time and virtual reality. And if you do enjoy this show, then please do consider becoming a contributor to the Patreon at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
