[As someone interested in both presence and time perception (one reason I collect clocks), I find this story from Psychology Today particularly intriguing. It’s about a series of experiments that suggest that experiences in large virtual environments (those that take advantage of the ability of virtual reality to fully immerse the user’s senses), contribute most to a sense that time is passing quickly. –Matthew]

[Image: An example maze seen by participants in studies described in Mullen, Davidenko, and Kingstone (2025)]

When Virtual Reality Makes Time Fly (and When It Doesn’t)

VR may only “compress” time in larger virtual environments.

By Grayson Mullen [a doctoral student working in the Brain, Attention, and Reality Lab at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver]
Nicolas Davidenko, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he teaches courses on perception, illusions, and face recognition.
June 27, 2025

The first time I used virtual reality (VR), I was struck by how completely it cut my senses off from my surroundings. By the time I took the headset off, I had lost track of where I was standing in the room, which direction I was facing, and how much time had passed.

That feeling of time loss motivated a study that I published with Nicolas Davidenko in 2021, in which we asked participants to estimate time while playing a simple video game, either in VR or in a control condition (a regular computer screen). The results showed that people tended to underestimate the passage of time in VR. But that finding was only a first step, and it left open some crucial questions that could only be answered by new experiments. Other researchers, for example, have shown that the time compression effect is stronger for VR newcomers than for more experienced VR users.

A new study of time perception

In a new follow-up study just published in Timing & Time Perception, we addressed some of the limitations of the original experiment and explored the nuances of VR’s relationship with time perception. Our results indicate that VR doesn’t always make time fly, but that this “time compression” effect may depend on the size of the virtual environment.

In the original study, participants played a video game that involved solving increasingly difficult 3D mazes. The VR and control condition versions of the game were nearly identical, except that the mazes appeared larger in VR than on the regular computer screen. That difference was a natural consequence of VR taking up the user’s entire field of view, but it also meant that playing the game in VR required participants to move their eyes more—a potential confounding variable.

In Experiment 1 of our new study, we shrank the VR environment to ensure that the maze would be the same size in the VR and regular computer screen conditions. We also increased our sample size, used higher-resolution screens, and tested longer durations than in the original study. This modified replication led to a surprising result—participants in the new experiment overestimated the passage of time in VR, rather than underestimating it.

Reconciliating opposing results

To find out if this reversal was caused by the new changes we’d made to our methods, we reverted to the original hardware, virtual environments, and time estimation task we’d used in the 2021 study for Experiment 2. While this direct replication didn’t bring back the original study’s underestimation effect, it did eliminate the overestimation effect we’d seen in the new study’s Experiment 1.

At this point, three experiments had given us three different answers to the question of how VR affects time estimation. But there was a revealing pattern across experiments: it was only time estimates in the VR conditions that were changing between experiments—data from the control conditions stayed relatively consistent. This meant that our changes to the size of our VR environments could have been responsible for the contradictory results we’d seen so far.

To test our suspicions, in Experiment 3, we systematically manipulated VR environment size and measured its effect on time estimation. Participants were assigned to estimate time in a small, medium, or large version of the VR maze environment. We found a small but significant effect: participants tended to underestimate the passage of time when the VR environment appeared large, and to overestimate the passage of time when it appeared small.

This finding may explain why people overestimated time in VR in Experiment 1 (which used a smaller VR environment), but underestimated time in VR in our earlier 2021 study (which used a larger one). More broadly, it may explain why I experienced time loss in VR in the first place, and why the effect may be harder to find in controlled lab experiments.

Compared with most commercial VR experiences, our virtual environments were tiny. Even in our study’s largest virtual environment, the maze could be viewed in its entirety from one angle. No head or body movement was required, and we gave participants no reason to look in any other direction. Creating a simple game that could be played both in VR and on a regular screen allowed us to make precise, controlled comparisons, but it also suppressed an aspect of VR that makes it unique – full, three-dimensional immersion.

Most VR experiences are immersive in an almost physical sense; the environment surrounds you in all directions. The ability to turn your head to take in the virtual world around, above, and below you creates a highly convincing sense of scale, especially in combination with VR’s binocular depth cues. These qualities can make you feel small in a way that nothing displayed on a regular computer screen ever could. Based on the results of our experiments, that sense of vastness may be pivotal for VR’s effect on time perception.

References

Mullen, G., & Davidenko, N. (2021). Time compression in virtual reality. Timing & Time Perception, 9(4), 377-392.

Manfredi, A., Dal Lago, S., Romano, D. L., & Gabbiadini, A. (2024). Can time flow differently if you are a virtual reality newcomer?. Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 18(4).

Mullen, G., Davidenko, N., & Kingstone, A. (2025). Virtual Reality’s Effect on Time Estimation is Inconsistent and Depends on Environment Size. Timing & Time Perception, 1(aop), 1-34.