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Outro/Conclusion

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Summary of End Result

After all these iterations and changes, the final state of the project is a prototypical vision of a therapy method, or rather a therapy-assisting method. The method starts on the Mnemo Website, where the users first learn about the project and are introduced to the process and can – if interested – read more about the principles. When starting the method, the users are first guided through a questionnaire informed by systemic therapy questioning techniques, helping with identifying 15 self-affirmative memories. In the next step, they start the Mnemo Web VR application and put on their VR set to enter the virtual memory palace. There, they are guided through constructing a memory palace and putting in memory objects to form a memory journey. The users are then guided to anchor the 15 memories from the questionnaire within the palace, tying each to an object on the journey. They can re-visit the palace to train the recall of the memories. After exiting VR, back on the Website, a recall sheet is generated that the users can refer to when training or refreshing recall-ability later.

This concludes the process of Mnemo. The idea is, that now users have learned a skill they can make use of in situations of mental health struggle. Taking a moment to enter the established palace within ones own mind, and thus being able to recall important positive memories more easily and intuitively by the power of association. 

Reflection on Process

As expected, the learning in this project was intense and pushed my boundaries. I pick my projects to always be at least a little bit outside of my comfort zone in regards of how used i am to all necessary tools and skills to guarantee me learning something new and staying mentally flexible. This also applied here very much, to different degrees in different aspects.  

The project was very varied, i did research into psychotherapy, neuroscience, and other involved fields. I did a range of design work: leveldesign, gamedesign, UX, webdesign, layout, visual Identity, process development, etc. Also a range of more technical tasks, that have design aspects like a lot of coding (some of it creative), some 3D Modelling or working with photogrammetry. While i like all of these aspects, the project turned out to be a bit more on the technical side than i originally anticipated, building something for VR was the main boundary pushing learning task, which despite advanced resources and default assets being available, was still hard to get to a degree of polish that i was used from previous non-VR projects with similar timeframe. This meant especially in the last few weeks, learning to let go of the idea that this would be a fully completed project. I know a thesis being a prototype is quite normal, but some corner of my brain still held onto producing a fully usable product for quite some time. This was probably one of the most valuable soft-skill learnings. 

The part that i think turned out great, is that the VR application conceptually worked with all of my testers and myself, that the overall technique seemed to work quite well, at least with my limited sample size. It was super interesting to see how differently all testers approached all parts of the process, but it worked out for all of them. Working with their memories and narrative and associative capabilities was very fascinating. I succeeded in building a bizarre and otherworldly style, that seems to lend well to memorization.

With more time, or if i would do it again, i would have spent more time on the interaction design of what kind of audiovisual feedback users get when completing tasks in the app and the web questionnaire. That is an important aspect, that in this state did not receive enough consideration. 

During the development, there were a few good and necessary calls in where to reduce/reomove features and where to expand/extend. This was at times a meditation on “killing your darlings”, but ultimately benefitted the project. For example, getting away from the idea of the app having to be a “Happy Place” rather early was important. Removing everything that is not in line with the photogrammetry-look and building back up again from there allowed the current style to even form in the first place. 

I think this is an easy project to extend upon in the future and explore further what potential can be unlocked with these kinds of memory techniques. 

Outlook/Future Possibilities

There are two different alleys of possibilities: One is the things that would be logical next steps, that were out of scope for the timeframe, the other would be larger ideas and directions to take this project in. 

//For the first alley, things that could be completed: 

To be able to use Mnemo as a tool in a real-world setting, a few things would have to be realized, which as of now are still at a placeholder stage: On the technical side, the app would have to be adjusted to fit web vr performance and be optimized to work on different end-user devices. Furthermore, the link between the questionnaire and the app would have to be implemented, so the memories are actually transferred, and the same goes for the recall sheet at the end, that it would be generated from data coming out of the application. The save system that is right now accessed from the editor, would need a way to track user progress via cookies, to keep the data available. Realistically, there would have to be much further thought put into this, since this data is very sensitive. For an actual public version there would have to be taken alot of care and reading up on data protecion laws and best practices. Ideally a data security expert would be hired, to make sure everything is securely stored, encrypted and kept private to the user.

What i would optimize in the app would be the action feedback, finding a way to actually detect when a memory or objet is placed finally and connected, to be able to enhance the experience by a success sound and animation, to provide moment-to-moment motivation. Also, on the topic of audio: sound is something that largely fell behind due to time restraints, sounds for teleporting, grabbing, pressing buttons, placing rooms, etc. would add a lot to the immersion. 

On the methodical side, the biggest work in progress would be the design and communication strategies of the in-app tutorial, it goes some way in explaining the app, for more experienced users or those who happen to understand the concept fast it works well, but anyone else might still struggle to fully grasp why they are doing specific steps and thus be not as motivated as they could be. This is a point that i underestimated at the beginning of the project, how non-intuitive the standard VR-controls are, and how much explaining or adjustment time is needed before users can confidently solve tasks above minimum complexity. This is also one of the biggest limiting factors in target group right now, in this version, only rather tech-affine users are fully able to reap the benefits in an easy way. 

As mentioned beforehand, there would also go much more user-testing into the aspect of the method being self-conducted, ideally with further help of a professional therapist. The form could potentially go through more iterations, and the testing would show how well the questioning techniques work without outside input.   

//The second alley: Further directions for the future

There is no scarcity in interesting things to potentially try out and features to add. Rather obvious are things like bringing back the per-room changing soundtrack, colours, skybox, ambiance that i played around with in the beginning. This might add more specificity in different dimensions to singular rooms. 

Additionally, also a thing i thought about originally having a library of animations and fitting UX to enable users to add these to objects. In this way, it might make connecting the memories and remembering the objects easier, since the movement wouldn’t have to happen in the mind only, but also in the virtual space. Movements might be the object spinning, getting bigger, smaller, tipping over, melting, opening up, disintegrating, and many more. Basically folding the bizarre imagery people come up with for their memory connections back into the app itself. 

In a similar vein, there are still many possibilities of trying to make generating the connecting images easier, by having more parts of it play out outside the users’ minds. What could narrative principles be, to make that part of the journey effortless during creation aswell? Which parts of the identified memories are general enough so they could be represented digitally with reasonable effort, but specific enough so they feel personal, identifiable and actually part of that memory? 

If this project was in longer term development, of course there would be more focus on the longer term testing results of participants: If, how, when they’re using their learned mind palace skills, what exactly can they draw from it. How is retention over longer periods of time? Could Mnemo profit from being connected/integrated with other techniques like journaling or meditation? Who profits most of this technique, does the application as a skill for situational mood management or as a constant, regular supportive presence work better?

In tandem with these explorations, there are also possibilities to extend the memory anchoring generally with more sensory dimensions. One of these might be associating single rooms, or larger parts/brackets/object groups of the journey with patterns, that have a real-world equivalent. For example, if the progression of circle, line, triangle, square, pentagon as it is in the app now would be even more present and connected visually, there could be a 3D-printed object, that the users can touch to access that part of the memory journey. An abstracted, physical representation of the mind palace, it could even be a wearable, like a loop bracelet of patterned bead one can touch like prayer beads. A different option would be an advanced audio system, where each of the objects has a recognoizable progression of notes, or specific sound, and in the end, the mind palace can be represented and recalled via a generated song that can be listened to on the go. 

More general, there is much potential to extend Mnemo into a larger platform for experimentation in the realm of mnemonic techniques and mental health treatment approaches. What if users could create numerous interconnected palaces and manage and fill them over longer spans of time, with Mnemo as a more regular companion technique, much like journaling? Memory athletes have often multiple mind palaces with a hundred or more anchors per palace, so it would be interesting to see how close to this capacity more casual users could get. Like many projects, this one too would profit from an active community, potentially even as a shared-development open source project. Giving people an open-ended toolbox would generate a lot of training and testing data, interesting inputs and potentially many new and unforeseen ways of using it, and might spawn new sub-projects and waves of experimental user-conducted research.

Flythrough of a memory palace

03/01

03/02