Theses 2019 - honorable mention

School: Faculty of Architecture CTU in Prague
Thesis Supervisor: Miloš Florian, Lukáš Kurilla

Virtual reality as a medium facilitating an immersive spatial perception is a new area of space creation that offers great potential. Like every newly spreading medium, virtual reality is currently searching for its expressive language and meaning – essentially the form and function of digital space. The thesis is based on the close relationship between space and the formation of memories in human memory. This connection is utilized by various memory techniques, such as memory palaces. They assist people in storing large amounts of information into long-term memory and are used, for example, for learning foreign languages. Memory palaces operate on the principle of mnemonic devices fictitiously placed in an imagined space. As part of the thesis, I designed a memory palace space in virtual reality, created based on the processed theory of digital space and the analysis of memory techniques. The functionality and effectiveness of the design were validated on a group of people who were allowed to navigate through the digital space. In the first test, subjects achieved 28% better results when learning from the Virtual Academy environment compared to learning in the conventional way from text. The collected data and insights were evaluated, and based on them, a new prototype and enhanced testing methodology were proposed. To gain a more comprehensive understanding of the application of the memory palace method in virtual reality, further tests are still needed. However, I dare say that this thesis provides a solid foundation for further research and demonstrates that the entire concept of the Virtual Academy is a viable idea and potentially a very effective new learning method.