No because physics. You cannot induce time dilation nor simulate relativistic effects outside of visual/auditory stimuli. Sci-fi is a good source of inspiration but within the constraints of the physical world

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"talking to a catgirl in VR chat makes a minute feel like an hour, but playing a catgirl in VR chat makes an hour feels like a minute"

-Einstein

I don't know I already feel like I've had some minor time dilation with drugs where my mind seems to go faster making time itself seem to go slower. So with that there seems to be at the very least a way to trick your brain into thinking it's had a longer experience than it's had. With some kind of neural implant and DNI with an even greater processing force who the fuck know what's you could trick the brain into experiencing.

Ok... Drugs... I think you have your hallucinatory answer. Done enough myself but that's not the same thing AT ALL. Did you age like dog years? No you did not. You didn't wake up a month older or younger so literally no time dilation. You were just high.

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It's called "bullet-time".

...I don't think you understand what time dilation means here... EXPERIENCING a longer time than the "real" time is time dilation, we aren't speaking of...I'm not even sure what you're speaking, time travel?

Aka, SIMULATING an experience of time that does not parse with the "real" time passage, this would indeed have nothing to do with your real time age or time travel.

OP asked if it could be done a la VR. It's not like we can teleport across the planet and experience robbing a bank or fucking a pornstar, but with VR you can simulate it.

Without altering the speed your brain operates at? probably not with doing actual time dilation.

But a cyborg/digital brain could double the speed that it runs at inside a simulation, such that every hour in VR is only 30 minutes IRL, in other words you'd need to overclock your brain.

Not really true time dilation, more like tricking your brain

Not today.

But maybe some day with brain interfaces. Neuralink could develop into something that could make it possible.

Personally, I hope a magnetic brain interface without surgery or wires will someday be developed.

Not VR. I think it would require some sort of computer/brain interface and the computer would have to be running some sort of simulation for the person to experience.

I can imagine some sort of 31st century version of Jackass where they hook the guy up to the machine and then let it run for a minute and then pull him out and are like "Haha, got you, just a prank bro, just a prank" and the guy is like "WTF you assholes, I just spent 40 years in prison".

I always imagined some vr environment that trains you to think faster and faster over time, which seems like it would be similar to time slowing down. Perhaps the vr is smart enough to adjust the physics of the world to match your faster thinking speed so it would seem normal speed (until you exit the simulation)

I might have to disagree with the other comments here actually, with a stipulation. You can’t (currently) make your time differ from the real people around you, so you can’t spend a day in vr and come out with a year passed in your mind and memories, but there’s no reason you can’t have time change for the npc’s in the simulation. For example you could be in a vr spaceship on a video call with someone while you’re going near a black hole, as you get closer, assuming an analog walkie talkie type transmission, their speech would be faster and tone shifted higher and everything since your time is “slowing down” next to the black hole, making everything go faster outside the black hole’s main influence, or have a ship going relativistic speeds have their transmission slow down with their video call due to the time dilation effects. This could be an accurate simulation because time always passes at one second per second for a given observer from their own perspective, so it could be indistinguishable from the real effect as long as it’s pre-programmed and limitedly interactive and everything. That might be the lame answer but I still think it’d be pretty cool to see something like simulating scientific concepts that in a game that could be made today. Unfortunately your time won’t pass any differently from the actual people around you though. There’s a game somewhere made by like MIT that simulates what it’s like if the speed of light is near walking pace, that’s probably about the type of thing you could get

Yes you 100% can slow the objects around you down. Blade & Sorcery has a slow time mechanic.

I'll put up a video of time slowing then speeding back up

Bro I had 2ci once and me and my girl both said time was ebbing. Like it would slow down then drift back up. Nothing major but the slower bits everything seemed 2x as slow and the fast bits were just normal

Time doesn't slow down for you in your own frame of reference.

No. But this is fun to play with: http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/

Your brain wouldn't change. Time passes as normal in your own frame of reference but time will pass differently for objects around you in other frames of reference (like in a weaker gravitational field or traveling at some velocity relative to your frame of reference).

When doing DMT, it only lasts a couple minutes but it can feel like an hour tripping out in a different universe.

I am not aware of any means to actually achieve this without a real gravity well or accelerating to obscenely high speeds.

You could try to achieve a similar effect by subtly accelerating the clocks for the players but you are unlikely to be able to get much of a difference without people noticing what's happening. I think you'd get away with running clocks 10% faster, maybe a little more but any more than that and it would start to get obvious and take people out of the experience.

Most of the shows I've seen do this use some sort of direct brain interface to basically write an experience to peoples brains rather than actually speed time up for them so the character doesn't age in real life. Right now, we don't have any means to write memory directly or to provide more than very basic direct brain inputs or control so that's also a no

Huh, you can totally stimulate time dilation though, its easy, an old time dilation torture method is to have you in a stark white room with nothing in it, every 2 hours you're fed a meal and then everything is removed, after a day you'll think you've been in there for days.

If you think about it, you would experience time in real time in whatever frame of reference you are in, so the real question is can you have accelerated experiences in VR such than when you take your hood off, you feel like you spent longer in VR than in the real world, like the Life Simulator in Rick and Morty.

Given that people have dreams which last minutes and feel like hours, it should be possible to tap into the same mechanism in some way once it is fully understood.

If you think about it, if you have experienced a real year, you only remember the highlights, so that is really all the VR would need to render.

In my opinion (limited physics understanding and as a student of biology), we cannot achieve actual time dilation like the experiments carried out in reality.

However, we can, as you've asked, achieve or simulate a pseudo form of time dilation by altering the users frame of reference, i.e time, day & night cycle, movement, input latency and isolation of the individual from reality. From my experience playing games, there are many games that already do this, i.e final fantasy 14, minecraft, etc etc. Day and night cycles happen in less than 24 hrs, the movement/distance covered in-game when traversing is also adjusted with the reference of those games day/night cycles.

However, from my experience, the emphasis of time is never a point of focus in these games, so we are players are never made acutely aware of the passage of time. For instance we don't have dialogues saying "it would take 3 days to reach another town" or "What took [insert MC] so long, its been [X] number of days."

In addition users are never isolated from the reality, therefore we are always more aware when 20mins or an hour has passed. Sometimes it also feels like reality is so much faster than the time we spent in these games. I have had those moments, where after finishing a story thinking that only 3 hrs has passed, but its already 10 hrs since I last started.

From my limited experience playing VR (it is expensive even now) if games can really isolate the players awareness from the real world (not like what you see in TV shows, but more like stop displaying actual time and having little not no interaction with reality), alter and emphasis that the passage of time is ever present, we might convince users that time is being dilated. Even then, i feel the effect would be limited since attempting to force these properties into interactions in the virtual environment such as talking or picking up items would be difficult without destroying the immersion

From a biological point of view, achieving a convincing time dilation effect with a direct brain interface would be difficult as our brain would have to transfer that information our other senses, and that in my opinion would be time gated. In order to trick the brain & body into thinking time has been dilated, i think you would have to attempt to achieve faster than human responses. This is where my limited understanding comes in, as an example, if you to guard from being hit by a ball in real life and, the whole experience of receiving and processing information would take 10 to 20sec. To go from 1 day in reality to 1 month in game, we would have to make that condense that whole sequence of being hit by a ball occur less than 1 milisecond.

For that to be possible, we would have to be part machine at that point to process that kind information at superhuman speeds, as someone suggested below, but that would also be limited to the transfer of information (speed of an electron, distance that the information has to travel) and the time taken to process that information (not just from us but the machine too).

To simulate actual time dilation, would a combination of both a pseudo dilation and a part machine human being that can process situations at super human speeds, as well as computers that can also process and transfer that amount of information at that speed. The closest we could get away with is like 1 day in real life is maybe 3 days in game. As it gets faster, it would become more apparent the human body cannot keep up, causing the effect and experience to be unconvincing and maybe comedic.

That is my thoughts and limited understanding (sorry i don't know how relativity would actually work)

You could imagine virtual planets that have different day lengths or year lengths and then time may feel differently there

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Ok that's just dumb

Yeah because that's actual science and not a camera thing. Can you hear my eyes roll 🙄 because you should

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Simulate and actually make happen are two entirely different things. You can hold a light saber, force choke Darth Vader and be a Thundercat in VR but that doesn't mean it's real or meaningful in anyway. This is literally the dumbest thing on the internet

No actually I do. I have a degree in physics you dullard. I don't think you understand reality

You're trying to use actual scientific language to describe something that A) isn't possible and B) is just the sci-fi rambling is a drug addled mind

Yeah that's not time dilation... That's being high🙄

I can't believe I argued with idiots doing drugs about science 🙄 MORONS in hallucinogenics 🙄🙄

I love that idiots down voted this because they are convinced that doing DMT was science... Dumbasses 🙄

...yes and words can mean different things, English words even have a definition and a definition with the opposite meaning. Here you're looking at the meaning in scientific studies of physics which is not how we are used ng these words. I have a law degree, which is sort of like a degree in communicating. You're indeed the Dillard for not even trying to parse what we're saying but somehow sticking your definition in when it obviously doesn't fit what we are communicating around it, which are called context clues and are used for children to start understanding language. Lol, good bye and enjoy being too clever and educated by half.

I just it's assume something like faster CPU cycles but I mostly only had it occur when smoking weed.

>Is it possible to spend a day in future virtual reality that would feel like a week, a month of even a year?

No, but that's also not the effect of time dilation. Your subjective perception of time is always the same, it's everything else that seems to slow down when moving in relation to you.

That said, there are indeed a bunch of gamified relativity simulators out there like this one from 2012 http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/

I don't know of any relativity simulators for VR, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was one out there. I suspect the hard part isn't simulating relativity, but doing it in a way that doesn't cause the VR user to throw up.

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You sound like a closed minded simpleton. If you haven't experienced it, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I don't see what's so crazy about technology simulating time dilation when we can already do it through drugs. I mean, adrenaline alone can change your perception of time. You seem to be misunderstanding the conversation and are being immature about it.

No one is trying to imply time itself will go slower or something, calm down.

Sure. Let’s say you have a home planet where your friends and family live. You get in a starship, travel a crazy distance at near light speed and return home to find that hundreds of years have passed and everyone your character knew is dead.

Would that satisfy the simulation you have in mind? Because that’s definitely doable.

Don’t need VR. Jim carry simulated it well in Pet Detective

Decades ago, when Max Payne was a huge hit, a coworker was saying he wished there was a multiplayer mode and some players could use slow motion while others couldn’t.

No amount of explanation worked on him.

If I'm dumb then what does that make you

I'm not really bringing physics into it -- purely just from a biology standpoint. It's like when I nearly get into a car accident or something and my body ups my adrenaline...time seems to move more slowly, in part (I believe), just from that my brain is processing things more quickly (I crashed my mountain bike a couple years ago, and I was perplexed at how long it took me to actually hit the ground). To me at least, it seems as if I could think twice as fast (similar to when I crashed my bike), that time would appear to run more slowly.

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The black holes in Space-Engine are a laugh, so is travelling at 100 ly/second through space.

Not exactly. We perceive time as a constant. Time dilation is only understood in relative comparisons.

For example, you leave and experience one day passing. Did you experience time dilation? You don't know. When you return, you could find that one day passed for everyone else or you could find that one week passed for everyone else.

This can be simulated and doesn't require VR at all. In fact its a common trope is movies, tv, video games, etc. A person leaves and comes back to everyone aged differently - by years or centuries.

OP is asking about Virtual Reality Environment...not real world science. If you added a second/3rd person in VR you can experience it from one of 3 vantage points.

Can you hear my eyes roll 🙄 because you should

I think you need to have a bit more thought about what "real" and "meaningful" mean.

If you become frightened in a dream, you experience physiological symptoms, sweating, release of adrenaline, in some cases one can dream of past trauma and have re-occurances of depression.

If you become frightened in a dream, you experience physiological symptoms, sweating, and release of adrenaline, in some cases one can dream of past trauma and have re-occurrences of depression.ion.e, and one in which it is possible to induce psychological and physical damage to both mind and body.

I'd call that pretty "real" and "meaningful" to be honest.

You're an idiot. Anyone that chooses a handle that includes Hitler had mental health issues. But please... Go on you Nazi...

This is actually something I have thought about in regard to the possibilities of our reality, similar to simulation theory (if we ever end up being capable of simulating a world like ours on a computer, we could theoretically be one of the simulations)

If we are ever capable of essentially creating VR lifetimes that are indistinguishable from reality, couldn’t our consciousness simply be just that? I have no idea how plausible it is, but it’s definitely a fascinating thing to wonder about.

Considering I actually am a physicist, much smarter than you 😁

Oh, so focusing on one particular area of expertise automatically makes one a master of all things manners, does it?

How delightful!

One must certainly be the epitome of etiquette and charm.

Bravo!

Goodness gracious, it appears we've stumbled upon a prodigy in the art of conversation and debate.

I do hope this individual has had the chance to familiarise themselves with the finer points of discourse, such as the concept of ad hominem.

As for my moniker, it's a nod to a choose-your-own-adventure book about the murder of one Herr Hitler, which I had the pleasure of co-authoring a solid ten years ago.

Jolly good show!

I think tiger37211 and this is not an insult, has some kind of insular thinking and is unable to see others viewpoints, so just attacks the person rather than the idea, good old Ad hominem fallacy.

If you want to experience time dilation as physics describes it, you don’t need virtual reality. Because no matter what, you always experience time local to you as one second per second. Time dilation doesn’t change our perception of motion.

Satellites have to adjust their atomic clock by some very small percent to stay in sync with us, because they are accelerating to stay in the right orbit. So that’s the extent of time dilation we could have practical access to.

But that doesn’t get to the salient point. The point is, if you had a twin who went off on a spaceship and experienced enough time dilation to get 1 second for every 2 that passed at home, and somehow didn’t have to worry about being squished by the extreme acceleration, he would come home in a year to us, having only lived for six months to him, and everything in his point of view would have moved at normal rates.

Other way round. The twin that experiences dilation experiences less time than the one who stays home. You put him in, take him out a minute later and he’d be like, why’d you take me out so fast, I barely had time to see anything!

I do it all the time when I listen to podcasts at 150% speed.

I feel like this is as easy as showing something boring, like a clock ticking every second. Time feels slower when you’re bored, faster when you’re having fun. Time dilation..oooh ahhh