People
recall information better after viewing it in an immersive virtual environment
than they do when using a desktop display, according to recent research
conducted at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Volunteers
first studied printouts of two 21-image sets of famous faces, such as Napoleon,
Gandhi, Mickey Mouse, George Washington, and Marilyn Monroe. They were then
shown one set of faces placed throughout one of two “memory palaces,” either an
ornate palace or a medieval townscape.
After five minutes to navigate and study
the memory palace and then a two-minute break, the subjects re-entered the
memory palace, where the faces had been replaced by numbers, and were asked to
recall which faces had been in which positions. Half of the participants viewed
the scene first using a virtual-reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) and
then a desktop computer display with mouse-based interaction; the other half
used the desktop first and then the HMD.
“The
users that used the HMD first and then moved to a traditional desktop had
better performance than those who used the desktop first and then the HMD,”
wrote the researchers. “This suggests a positive transfer effect from the HMD
to a desktop.”
Overall, VR users showed
8.8% better recall, which means immersive VR-based education and virtual memory
palaces may prove more effective than traditional methods in K-12, higher ed,
and job training.