Time Anomalies in Virtual Reality - Impact of Manipulated Zeitgebers on Individual Human Time Perception.

Virtual reality (VR) technologies are becoming more and more present in recent years and are no longer limited to the well-known use case of video games, as they are also expanding their way into social networks, digital marketplaces and productive work. The more time people spend in VR,the more important the question becomes, whether a computergenerated reality can also influence human time perception. This work follows the goal of investigating the impact of zeitgebers, in particular the movement speed of a virtual sun, on human time judments in VR. The development platform Unity is used to create different VR worlds with varying sun movement speeds. In a user study with 12 participants, each person is immersed twice for a period of 10 minutes, and at the end of each scenario, they must estimate, how much time they think they have spent in the specific VR world. The evaluation reveals a trend, that the duration in a static world, without any visual objects, is estimated longer, compared to a virtual island environment with sun movement. When comparing an island world with different sun speeds, the estimated duration when experiencing a faster movement of the sun, turns out longer. The study has proven, that the presence of a virtual moving sun increases the estimation accuracy significantly, compared to conditions where no sun is visible or moving. The analysis shows no significant differences, when comparing the submitted duration estimates from each participant.