Most physicists agree that time travel into the past is impossible, but what if virtual reality (VR) could provide a workaround?
Doron Friedman is the director of the Advanced Virtuality Lab (AVL) at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel. His group researches a host of topics related to virtual, mixed and augmented reality as well as brain-computer interfaces.
In particular, his group is interested in behavioral realism: getting people to behave the same way in VR as they would in the real world. This not only makes it easier to carry out studies on people in simulations of real-world situations, it makes VR a powerful tool for exploring how humans might behave in alternate realities.
“The most interesting thing is making you behave realistically, but in worlds that are impossible,” says Friedman. “Immersive VR can be like a metaphysical lab. Many things work like the real world but it also allows us to do things not possible in the real world.”
His group has experimented with allowing people to fly and also be in two places at once, but the most interesting line of research involves time travel. In 2014 his group teamed up with the University of Barcelona’s Experimental Virtual Environments (EVENT) Lab, run by Mel Slater, to create an immersive virtual experience of traveling back in time.
A paper published in Frontiers in Psychology describes how participants were placed in a virtual art gallery where they could control an elevator to transport visitors to an upper level. However, one of these visitors subsequently shoots several others after arriving on the top floor.
The participants were then sent back to relive this experience, faced with a moral dilemma about where to direct the shooter to limit deaths. But while half simply repeated the simulation as if replaying a level in a video game, the other half experienced virtual time travel.