Virtual Reality of Time - Concept and Applications

⏳🪄🤔

👨‍💻 Who am I

• Shutaro Aoyama
• Freshman at Columbia University
  • School of Engineering and Applied Science
• Bluemo (@blu3mo) / Twitter
• Interest: I aim to make absolute things relative by engineering interactions between humans and the environment
  • This involves relativizing reality, time, space, gender, and more.

📕 What is “Virtual Time”?

• Analogy: Virtual Reality but for Time, not Space
  • 🗺 Physical Space vs Virtual Space
    • 
  • 🕑 Physical Time vs Virtual Time
    • (making physical time relative)
• Definition:
  • Definition of Virtual Reality:

    • An experience that may seem different from reality on the surface but has virtually the same effect as reality (Hirose, 2019)

  • Therefore, the definition of Virtual Time:

    • The experience of “time” that may seem different from real time on the surface but has virtually the same effect as time.

🛠 How is it possible?

• i.e. How can we recreate the virtual effect of time?
• Virtual Space:
  • Perception of space: Internal Sense of Space + External Stimuli
    • External Stimuli: Sight, Sound, Haptics, etc
  • Creating the experience of moving in virtual space through artificial stimuli
  • Virtual Space allows for more freedom
    • Such as flying, warping, non-Euclidean space, etc.
• Virtual Time:
  • Perception of time: Internal Sense + External Stimuli
    • External Stimuli: Sense of synchronization with other changing elements (clocks, people, etc)
      • (hypothesis)
  • Creating the experience of moving in virtual time through artificial stimuli
  • Virtual Time offers more freedom
    • Such as speed manipulation, warping, looping, etc.

🤔 What I want to do with this concept

• Rather than imposing virtual reality/time, I aim to offer an alternative choice of reality/time.

⚗️ Applications

- ![image](https://gyazo.com/aa4aa6d64e61224f2d038972922c98e9/thumb/1000)
- Interactive lecture video streaming platform
    - Overlaying student-generated content on lecture videos
- Goal: Combining the benefits of real-time and on-demand lectures
    - Real-time lectures allow interactive communication among students
    - On-demand lectures provide time control
- Method: Using virtual time through artificial stimuli

        - Providing a pseudo sense of synchronization with other students interacting during lectures

        - Adjusting playback speed discreetly within the range of 0.9~1.2x
        - Synchronizing unsynchronized students
        - ![image](https://gyazo.com/d9aa579ae06f8ecdc2c58d7e84c24322/thumb/1000)
        - ![image](https://gyazo.com/c33ad3034813d68a4ea13ff647e27ffa/thumb/1000)

- Issue with current voice communication: Only one thread available
    - Difficult to have multiple branches of discussion
- Applying ==Elastic Sync== to create multithreaded voice communication, where participants eventually receive content from every thread