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

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

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

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.

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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

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

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

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

>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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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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