Equinox: Exploring Naturalistic Distortions of Time Perception

Abstract

Subjective estimates of duration co-vary with emotion, focus, and task engagement in laboratory tests. Outside of the lab, the structural role of ubiquitous time-keeping devices has largely prevented the naturalistic study of this phenomena. In this paper, we present a new watch interface - -called Equinox - -designed to study time distortion in ecologically valid settings for the first time. Among other interactions, Equinox invites a user to guess the time in order to reveal the time. We test this novel interface with a small set of initial users to evaluate the practicality of naturalistic time perception research. Our work provides opportunities for future interfaces that might capture time distortion measurements as an objective marker that co-varies with the daily dynamics of user arousal, engagement, and emotion.