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Practice

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Starting Point, Starting Direction

Previous work in this project during the thesis proposal:

Coming from all this research, most of which i did during the proposal, i set out to building a proof of concept VR environment, to get a first understanding and feeling for how the intersection between the three topics VR, mnemonics and mental health treatment could work.

Fitting to the smaller scope of the proposal, i built an environment with a distinct retro-videogame appeal, to cater to my own sensibilities and previous experiences with the Method of Loci. The Mnemo proposal memory palace is a ready-made VR environment that consists of five islands connected with walkways in a wheel-like structure, making a round-trip memory journey possible. The player can walk around and teleport-move with unitys standard VR-controls. The islands are made to be as distinguishable and iconically simple as possible, and from a free asset pack collection of various objects i spread a selection of furniture, super market items, video game interactables, and everything i found memorable over the islands to enable making an effective memory journey.

The testing methodology was loosely borrowed from the [2013 paper], first i identified 15 positive, self-affirming memories, without further guidance. I just sat down and thought of 15, wrote them down and tried to access the memory in as much detail as i could muster (effortful recall). Then i walked through the memory palace, and firstly learned the structure of the palace, namely the order of rooms and the order of objects inside until i could recite them effortlessly. Then i went through again, and came up with bizarre imagery connecting a memory to each object.

Wanting to keep the door open to anchor even more memories later, i put 5 Anchor objects on each island, making a total of 25. I thus ended up using only the first 15 of the anchors, i concluded that sticking to this number for the future will be enough, since the bottleneck here is not the palace (memory athletes can put 100 or more anchors in a palace!) but the ability and motivation to identify positive memories. And to identify 15 one really has to think and search already.

This approach worked pretty well for myself, remembering the palace, objects, and associated memories too was quite effortless, both the training and the recall. What mightve been a limiting factor is the fact that i also built the palace myself in Unity beforehand, possibly making it much easier for me to remember, opposed to someone not familiar with the environment beforehand.

The exploration in the proposal signalled to me the base viability of the project, that this might be an interesting space to explore.

Intentions for Thesis

Coming from the proposal, i’ve gone into the development of the thesis app prototype with a list of things to test for feasibility:

Changing the overall look to something more universal, less specific, since the video game look caters to a specific niche of people, and not the broader public.
Exploring giving users more control over the palace, having influence on the structure, the placement or look of rooms, order and look of the memory objects. I wanted to test if this enhanced level of control might lead to easier memorability and/or more fun, engagement and motivation for the overall process.
In my proposal outlook i stated that i was looking to make the VR application also a “Happy Place”, making it as comfortable, calming and meditative as possible. This is an aspect that i removed in a later stage, while i of course did not want my VR app to be uncomfortable, Happy Places and what makes (especially virtual) places calming, are a completely different topic one could dedicate an own project to, so i chose to not go down this avenue for the sake of focus.
I wanted to tie everything together as a clear process, from start to finish, how to work with the technique every step of the way, so the project is the whole method, and not just an VR application on it’s own.
I generally wanted to test out further ways to facilitate memory anchoring, using colors, shapes, sound, animation, text, essentially everything digitally available as a possible anchoring medium.

The following development documentation (DevLog) is split into four parts. Each consist of a summary of what changes i made, which features i implemented, how and why, followed by a full test of the whole process with a participant. Although I streamlined the protocol every iteration, identifying 15 positive memories, building a mind palace, anchoring the memories, then training the recall, – the core of the technique – remains an involved process. It takes up to two hours and a trusting relationship to the participant, which is why i erred on the side of testing more qualitative than quantitative.