The Virtual Memory Palace
Abstract The intention of the Virtual Memory Palace is to help peopl e memorize information by addressing their visual memory. The concept is based on the “Memory Palace” as an ancient Greek memorization technique, where symbols are placed in a certain way within an imaginative building in order to remember the original information whenever the mind goes through the vision of this building again. The goal of this work was to create su ch a Memory Palace in a virtual environment, so it requires less creative effort of the contemporary learner than was necessary in ancient Greece. The Virtual Memory Palace offers the possibility to freely explore a virtual 3d ar chitectural model and to place icons at va rious locations within this model. Speci fic behaviors were assigned to these locations to make them more me morable. To test the benefit of this concept, an experiment with 15 subjects was conducted. The results show a higher rememb rance rate of items learned in the Virtual Memory Palace compared to a wordlist. The observations made during the test showed that most of the subjects enjoyed the memorization environment and were astonished how well the Virtual Memory Palace worked for them.