Constructing hermeneutical relations: a postphenomenological inquiry into immersive VR memory palaces

Abstract

While VR adaptations of the mnemonic Method of Loci (or the ‘Memory Palace’ technique) show promising results in increasing mnemonic capabilities, little to no research has explored the use and integration of Virtual Memory Palaces over time in a context of self-initiated studying. To explore the use of Virtual Memory Palaces (VMPs) contextually, we conducted an in-the-wild study where we gave ten participants a VR Head-Mounted Display through which they could access and furnish their VMP over eight weeks. We conducted go-along interviews in our participants’ VMPs at various intervals throughout the eight-week study, exploring their creations and querying them about their experience. Based on our findings, this article discusses individual and contextual factors that come into play when a VMP is approached as a personal project in the midst of an already-established study routine. We frame our study as a postphenomenological inquiry into the mediating effects of VMPs, where our primary interest lies in what relationship the students developed to the VMP.

1 Introduction

The Method of Loci (MoL) is an effective mnemonic that allows users to memorise vast amounts of information. Proficient users of the method can show impressive feats, such as memorising the number pi to over 65,536 digits (Raz et al. 2009), or recalling the order of a deck of cards in 12.74 s (Wor, n.d.). The method, which has been used since classical times, works by the imagination of spatially organised visual associations (Yates 1966). In performing the method, the user imagines a place she knows well as the locus for her “Memory Palace” (MP) before visualising associations to what she wants to recall at given locations in the MP (‘loci’). Then, when she needs to recall the information, she mentally walks through the environment, which is populated with associations to what she wants to recall.

To tap into the potential of this method, researchers have in recent years revisited the MOL through various forms of adaptations to the technology of Immersive Virtual Reality (VR). VR technologies work by immersing its users in three-dimensional environments that can be filled with 3D objects, images, videos, etc. This way of organising information visuospatially makes the technology particularly fit for mediating the MOL. The underlying rationale behind these explorations is that by using VR to facilitate the MOL through the presentation of visuospatial loci, the method might be easier to use and learn (Liu et al. 2019; Gerard et al. 2021; Reggente et al. 2020; Vetter et al. 2020). So far, research has shown that using a virtual environment as the locus of the MP is comparable in effectiveness to the MOL as traditionally performed by novice users (Legge et al. 2012). Moreover, immersion seems to be a factor in this effectiveness, as users are able to recall the information better by being immersed in the VMP as opposed to viewing it on a flat-screen (Krokos et al. 2019; Yang et al. 2020; Gerard et al. 2021). Results from a study by Reggente et al. (2020) also suggest that interactivity in the VMP is beneficial for memory enhancement; in an experimental study, they found that the experimental group which were allowed explicit binding of objects to the spatial environment recalled an average of 27.9% more objects than the control group.

While the results of conducted VMP studies are promising, the potential role that VMPs can serve for students, or other groups who are to self-initiate its creation, is still unclear. Currently, most research that has been done on VMPs has been conducted in labs where what to memorise, as well as their associations, have been predefined and decided by the researchers (Vindenes et al. 2018; Jund et al. 2016; Fassbender and Heiden 2006; Mann et al. 2017). These studies, where the users can not initiate the creation of their own VMPs, are limited in their ability to test the feasibility of using a VMP as part of a study regimen. Here, the users are not free to utilise the method for a purpose they see fit; they can only relate to the general VMPs already developed. Beyond making its use removed from a context of meaning, this adaptation leaves out several tenets of the original method that purports the use of creative, personal associations to what is to be memorised, as well as being familiar with the environment (Yates 1966). This particular adaptation of the method also impacts the kind of information that can be memorised. As participants can not choose personalised, creative associations to the information that is to be memorised, most studies avoid any use of associations to the memory content at all and choose ‘concrete’ words (e.g., “table”) rather than abstract words (e.g., “wisdom”), which further limits the kind of knowledge that can be memorised through VMPs.

Consequently, the use of visuospatial associations to the memory content—a core tenet of the MOL—is not explored. Lastly, and possibly due to the limitations of this particular MOL adaptation, studies have only been conducted experimentally in the lab for shorter periods of time, as opposed to studying the tool as part of students’ everyday educational contexts. In considering educational impact, therefore, “[e]xtending the MoL in ways where it can permit for the encoding of information beyond that of lists of objects is of high importance” (Reggente et al. 2020, p. 27).

1.1 A need for contextual inquiries

When a new study tool is adopted in the everyday of a student, it has to find its place in an ecology of tools for approaching the learning of curricula, as well as in a variety of learning contexts. As the use of mnemonics in education today is not widespread (Putnam 2015), we regard contextual inquiries as especially important in order to understand the potential role that this method can serve in the life of students embracing the learning of their curricula. While current research is valuable in the insight it provides into whether memory retention can be strengthened through VMPs, it provides limited insight into the potential role of such an application in students’ complex, everyday life.

Frauenberger (2019) discusses the entwined role of forms of evaluation and digital artefacts as creations of “configurations that enact certain phenomena” (p. 12), i.e., what we study is inextricably linked to the way in which we inquire into it. To exemplify this, Frauenberger (2019) discusses an imaginary artefact called Flow and writes how “an interview study will make Flow a cultural artefact, a controlled user testing study in the lab will make it a functional tool, and a long-term diary study might make it an artificial sense of people. We are not just studying different phenomena, we are studying different things…” (Frauenberger 2019, p. 15). In discussing VR mediation, Vindenes and Wasson (2021) similarly argue that while it, of course, is possible to evaluate an application in the laboratory, “this is not as likely to give an account of what the mediation effects of the technology will be, simply because one of the constituents of the virtually mediated experience (the world) will be different than what is being evaluated” (p. 6). Studying a VMP in the context of a personalised study regimen, as opposed to in a lab, is, therefore, to study a different ‘thing’; its becoming is dependent on the context in which it is used. Not only is the environmental context important; its use is also dictated by how users incorporate and comport themselves to and through the VMP to make its use meaningful for them in that context. For these reasons, we were motivated to conduct a study of VMPs in a context of self-initiated studying, where the tool would have to be taken up and incorporated into a study practice by our participants.

In order to gain insight into the use of VMPs as part of the students’ everyday, we conducted a qualitative, explorative in-the-wild study in which we gave ten students access to a VMP over eight weeks. The participants were given a variety of environments to choose from as the locus of their VMP, and by accessing a library of images, gifs, videos and 3D objects, they could choose their own associations and so furnish the VMPs themselves. In order to gain insight into our participants’ experiences in creating and relating to their VMPs, we conducted VR go-along interviews (Vindenes and Wasson, 2021b) inside the VMPs of the participants on two different occasions throughout the study, i.e., we conducted the interviews immersed in VR, being guided through the VMP by the participant, observing their creation and querying them about their experience and practice. By studying VMPs as part of students’ day-to-day, this research explores the possibilities and challenges involved with self-initiated use of VMPs in a natural context where it is used for a purpose that is meaningful and important for the student. The primary contribution of this article is the insight that it provides into how VMPs can be used constructively as part of a study process, but also the insight it provides into the various challenges that arise when VMPs are employed in the ecology of tools in students’ day-to-day study setting.

This article is structured as follows. First, we present Related Work on the Method of Loci and VMPs as well as the current role of mnemonics in education today. We further describe the tools we gave our participants for creating their own VMPs, before describing the research design of the study. We then provide an analysis of the findings of our go-along interviews inside the VMPs, discussing highlights and challenges our participants faced using VMPs as part of their day-to-day. Based on the results of our analysis, we engage in a critical discussion of factors pertaining to our particular adaptation and inquiry into VMPs, where the users creatively take part in creating and developing a relationship with their VMPs. Here, we discuss the opportunities and challenges of our approach in comparison to other adaptations. We end the article by stating the limitations of this study and outlining directions for future work.

2 Related work

2.1 The method of loci

The MOL is a mnemonic that has been used since classical times. A comprehensive overview of the history of the Method of Loci is provided by Yates (1966). She draws primarily on three sources; the anonymous work Rhetorica ad Herennium; Cicero’s De Oratore as well as Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. Although not the oldest of these texts, it is perhaps De Oratore which can provide the most illustrative ‘origin story’ of the Method of Loci. Here, we can read how Simonides of Ceos discovered the method when attending a banquet where the roof collapsed on the guests. When the roof collapsed, Simonides had left the banquet to settle some business, and upon returning, he could identify the guests based on where they had been sitting at the table. This pictorial tale illustrates the tenets of the method quite well; the MoL utilises visual and spatial cues to aid memorisation. To perform the MOL traditionally, one chooses a location in the real world to act as the locus of the MP, such as one’s apartment. Within this MP, one isolates a fixed set of sub-locations appropriate to the number of items one wants to memorise (‘loci’). When this is done, one can mentally walk through the MP, visualising associations to the items one wanted to recall (e.g., spaghetti on the balcony).

When the MoL is adapted to VR, the VMP can be experienced as a three-dimensional environment instead of one merely imagined; the visual cues to the memories are laid out in the virtual environment encompassing the user. The user can then navigate and orient within this world to memorise the chosen subject and later mentally revisit the MP to access the memories. It is believed that it is the combination of the visual and the spatial that aids the memorisation process (Nyberg et al. 2003; Maguire et al. 2003), and as VR provides actual visual and spatial cues, the technology is especially suitable to mediate the method (for a theoretical discussion of method efficacy, see the article by Peeters and Segundo-Ortin (2019)).

2.1.1 Degrees of immersion

Since the mid-2010s, research exploring VR adaptations of the MOL has increased. While some preliminary work was done before the dawn of commercial VR systems (Fassbender and Heiden 2006; Legge et al. 2012; Hedman and Backström, 2003; Jund et al. 2016), or with smartphones (Sandberg et al. 2021), the research volume at large is concerned with degrees of immersion exceeding 2D squared displays. The MOL has now seen adaptations to immersive VR through CAVE systems (Mann et al. 2017), three degrees-of-freedom (3DOF) HMDs (Vindenes et al. 2018; Huttner et al. 2019; Huttner and Robra-Bissantz 2017; Ranpariya et al. 2022), and now lately also six degrees-of-freedom (6DOF) HMDs (Krokos et al. 2019; Vetter et al. 2020; Liu et al. 2019; Bierig and Krueger 2020).

Generally, studies show that an increase in immersion is beneficial for method execution and subsequently increased memory recall (Krokos et al. 2019; Yang et al. 2020; Gerard et al. 2021). This makes sense from an embodied cognition perspective as the “virtual environment evokes those sensorimotor interactions which resemble traditional memory palace usage” (Peeters and Segundo-Ortin 2019, p. 9). Through 6DOF VR systems, users can not only orient themselves in the VE through natural interaction as they can in 3DOF VR, they can also physically move about in the virtual environment by walking, leaning and bowing down, just as they can in unmediated physical environments.

2.1.2 Difference in adaptation

Beyond degrees of immersion, the studies further vary in their interpretation of the method in how and to what degree the system facilitates the MP creation. Some provide what we could call a “template approach”, presenting a virtual environment to the user void of visual associations, where the user is supposed to perform the conventional MOL using the virtual environment (Legge et al. 2012; Huttner and Robra-Bissantz 2017). Other studies have attempted a more “full” approach, where the VMP is filled with visual loci throughout the MP, not requiring the user to perform the MOL themselves—at least in the traditional way (Vindenes et al. 2018; Jund et al. 2016; Fassbender and Heiden 2006; Mann et al. 2017; Liu et al. 2019).

Neither of these adaptations faithfully adapt the MOL, as traditionally conceived, to VR. While the template approach allows users to use personalised visual associations, this approach is not necessarily distinguished from the traditional MOL as it requires the user to perform the conventional MOL only in relation to a virtual environment. Neither does the full approach truthfully adapt the traditional MOL as the users can not choose their own visual associations nor the general use case or theme for the VMP itself. There is here, in other words, no creation involved; the VMP is a static and complete environment and the only interactivity involved is through traversion and observation. Peeters and Segundo-Ortin (2019) write how “[u]ntil now, research on the virtual memory palace has presented the memoriser as a somewhat passive participant” (p. 4), and hence, current adaptations “fall short because they depend on cognitivist understandings of the technique” (p. 2). The authors argue that researchers should explore adaptations informed by enactive, embodied cognition that “promote the active engagement of the memoriser to navigation, choice of loci, and choice of image” (p. 5).

While most studies fall short in fulfilling these recommendations, studies have since been conducted that have explored more active user participation. Bierig and Krueger (2020) present a pilot study of a VMP which allowed the users to choose their own associations between a content library of 50 images sorted categorically and place them freely in the environment. However, the researchers predefined what was to be remembered as Nobel Prize winners, and the research was conducted in-lab. In an experimental study comparing different architectural structures for VMPs, the adaptation by Gerard et al. (2021) also allowed the user to choose images sorted categorically to place in set frames in the environment. This study was also a brief experimental encounter that had the researchers decide what was to be memorised (in this case, randomly organised playing cards). Vetter et al. (2020) presents the design of a VMP application where the user similarly can browse libraries of 3D objects so that they can choose their own associations, however, this application was not evaluated by users. These are nevertheless more faithful adaptations of the MOL as they can afford a more self-directed and personal MVP creation.

2.2 Role of mnemonics in education

In addition to the general critique that may be raised against current approaches in terms of their ability to account for the role of the VMPs when adopted into a self-directed practice by students, there are additional concerns relevant to the potential of VMPs in need of discussion. As the role of mnemonics in education today is not widespread (Putnam 2015), one may rightfully question the potential role of mnemonics in a study regimen. In an increasingly digitally mediated everyday where we are entangled with a myriad of computers in different shapes and forms with incredible storage capabilities, the need for mnemonics is not the same as in the orator culture in which the MOL emerged. Our increasing dependence on ‘off-loading’ information to digital artefacts, however, is not solely viewed in terms of its benefits. Researchers are currently looking into how research participants’ degree of recall depends on how much they depend on external sources, referred to as the “Google effect” (Sparrow et al. 2011; Schooler and Storm 2021). While VMPs can also be regarded as part of our “extended mind” so that our mind might extend to rely on it for a particular way of cognitive functioning, the MOL nevertheless emerges as a different approach, as it is not so much a question of “offloading” as of “imprinting.” Once the VMP has been used, the memory of it will (ideally) be accessible even when one has left the VMP.

That being said, although the MOL can prove to be valuable for students—as they are a group for whom memorisation is required—finding a natural place for it in a study regimen is nevertheless not necessarily straight-forward.

In a literature review, Putnam (2015) explored how students used mnemonics as part of their study regimen. Apart from the fact that they are not widely used, he found that mnemonics especially find their place in subjects where relationships between the learning content do not come easily (e.g., learning the citric acid cycle), but also in education as an aid for recall once students already know the material (Putnam 2015). It is at this stage that the student can “identify which information is critical, create a code or keyword for the critical information, and then store the keywords in a system such as the method of loci” (Putnam 2015, p. 136). For this reason the ideal use of mnemonics would be in conjunction with other learning strategies. Benefits of the effective incorporation of mnemonics need not necessarily be higher grades or recollection (although this can also occur), but can be found in ‘non-memory effects’ such as reduced anxiety as well as more motivation towards approaching the learning activities (Putnam 2015). Essentially, mnemonics can be a tool of empowerment in a student’s toolbox, however, an essential factor towards this goal is how the mnemonic is taken up by the student and integrated into their study practice. We reiterate that it is precisely this which current literature is ill-suited to account for; how VMPs can take shape in a context of self-initiated studying. In lab experiments, the process is streamlined: everything is set up and ready for use. The experience does not occur in a context where the students would have to arrange its continual incorporation into their everyday, after the peak of the novelty effect of experiencing a new technology has subsided. In other words, VMP use has not been studied when situated in the messiness of everyday life. Therefore, aspects of relevance for incorporating VMPs in a setting that can have value for the participants are left unexplored.

2.3 Rote memorisation vs. learning

Another issue that Putnam (2015) highlights is an additional common criticism of VMPs, namely that rote memorisation is antithetical to learning. In fact, current VMP research provides a good example of rote memorisation: the participants in these studies are usually tested in their ability to remember, through VMPs, a sequence of seemingly non-related information. Word lists to be remembered are often made so that it is hard to see a connection between the words apart from the connection that the VMPs facilitate. Here, only content devoid of interrelations is chosen to ensure homogeneity between the research participants.

From our position, in line with Putnam (2015), however, we do not regard the critique of rote memorisation as applicable to mnemonics such as the MOL when integrated as part of a generally sound study regimen; mnemonics “were designed to enhance recall, not facilitate higher order learning” (p. 132). Adopting a mnemonic technique naturally does not impact one’s capability of higher order learning, and so it is perfectly possible to memorise information that is otherwise well understood, but which simply is not easy to recall. As Reggente et al. (2020) write, “the reliable effectiveness of the MoL and the evolutionary honed spatial binding mechanism that it leverages, needs not be limited to increasing the recall of arbitrary lists of digits or words” (p. 27). While the critique of rote memorisation might stand against lab studies tasking participants to recall pre-defined lists of arbitrary items, we do not see the potential of VMPs in rote memorisation of random facts, but rather as a means for structuring relevant, already learned information for student-centric purposes. The potential of VMPs lies in their enabling students to facilitate the retrieval of systematically structured ‘already-learned’ information relevant to the task. Memorisation conceived of in this manner, as much as it involves remembering particular pieces of information, equally involves a “forgetting” of the information that is irrelevant to the task as this may cloud the retrieval of the essential information. This phenomenon, where prior learning has a disruptive effect on the recall of information that is more recently learned, is referred to as proactive interference (Bass and Oswald 2014). Bass and Oswald (2014) write that the implications of their research are that “top-down proactive strategies such as the method of loci can significantly reduce proactive interference” (p. 49). Here, the role of the MOL is seen as structuring and prioritising relevant information, where participants “selectively ignore non-target information” (Bass and Oswald 2014, p. 49), which facilitates the retrieval of the relevant information by subsuming it under a common category or purpose. The MOL can, in this way, benefit students by enhancing distinctive encoding and reducing “retrieval competition”, which previous studies have linked to a reduction of proactive interference (Bass and Oswald 2014, p. 49). So while the associations and the connections between them could be conceived of as “rote memorised”, there is nevertheless a crucial difference when what the associations stand for are meaningful to the participant beyond the “mere” associations themselves.

2.4 Postphenomenological inquiries in HCI

In addition to moving our research inquiry out of the lab, our study is distinguished from other VMP studies in terms of its focus. Through the foregrounding of contextual factors, our study is explorative and qualitative, where the goal of our inquiry is to understand the relationship that our participants developed to their VMPs. Within this overarching focus, we were further interested in how this relation shaped their user experience and the role which the VMP came to serve as part of our participants’ everyday. Our perspective in this inquiry is informed by postphenomenology, a philosophy of technology concerned with empirical data that understand technologies as mediators of human-world relationships. In his article Entanglement HCI The Next Wave?, Frauenberger (2019) discusses postphenomenology as one of the “entanglement” theories apt to account for “the increasing ontological uncertainties that technologies such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence or neuro-implants pose” (Frauenberger 2019, p. 21). In order to make sense of such technologies, Frauenberger (2019) suggests developing “agonistic, participatory speculation methods to design meaningful relations, rather than optimising user experiences” (Frauenberger 2019, p. 22, emphasis added).

As a philosophy of technology concerned with empirical data, postphenomenology has indeed been particularly interested in how the relations we develop to technologies take part in shaping our experiences and practice, and in recent years, postphenomenologists and design researchers in Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) have realised their common interests. Conducting postphenomenological inquiries in HCI can “enable HCI and design researchers to deeper understand how the technological artifacts we make play a pivotal role in the co-construction and meditation of our everyday experiences” (Wakkary et al. 2018, p. 1). Through qualitative, contextual, and longitudinal explorations, we can explore “phenomena and implications of technological mediations that emerge in living with digital artifacts” (Wakkary et al. 2018, p. 1). In this way, systematically conducting postphenomenology can help us “to form a deeper understanding of people’s experiences and relations with technology” (Hauser et al. 2018, p. 459).

As we were interested in the “differential becoming” (Frauenberger 2019, p. 16) of VMPs in an unexplored context, we regard postphenomenology as a promising candidate to account for how our participants integrated the tool into their everyday, and how it mediated their perceptions and practices in the relationship that the participants developed to it.

As VMPs have not been studied in contextual inquiries before, we believe a focus on human-technology relations and mediations can be constructive for understanding challenges and opportunities that emerge when the tool is utilised over time in a relevant context. Peeters and Segundo-Ortin (2019) write that VMP “operationalizations need to be rethought through the perspective of an embodied cognizer which takes the movement within and active engagement with her (virtual) environment seriously…” (p. 9). Here, we consider our qualitative approach as having the possibility to inform new ways of understanding the potential of VMPs by attending to their becoming in a new context, where this becoming is also dependent on the VMP being used for a purpose meaningful to the participants.

3 Research design

We conducted an in-the-wild study to investigate the relationships our participants developed to their VMP over time, in a context of use. In-the-wild studies focus on “evaluating prototypes as they are really used and integrated within people’s lives” (Chamberlain et al. 2012, p. 795). While moving the study outside the laboratory entails a loss of experimental control, it was our intention that our study was to be open, qualitative and explorative and we were more interested in “demonstrating how new systems, devices and services are adopted as opposed to whether they match usability or criteria” (Chamberlain et al. 2012, p. 796). We see this approach as a postphenomenological inquiry into the mediation effects of a technological artefact, where the focus is on studying the constituted human-technology(-world) relations. Hauser et al. (2018) write how in HCI studies on technological mediation, the researchers stand in constructive roles regarding (1) choosing the participants, (2) crafting and evaluating the technological research product (mediator), and (3) choosing the environment of deployment (world/environment), see Fig. 1. In this section, we detail how we realised our study design in terms of choice of participants, application and context of use, as well as detailing our choice of the VR Go-along as the method for inquiring into this relationship at various intervals as it developed throughout the eight-week study period.

Fig. 1

Overview of technological mediation

3.1 Mediator

In our study, we were interested in how the VMPs would be integrated and experienced as part of the students’ everyday. To allow participants the possibility to furnish their own VMPs, we utilised a custom instance of Hubs Cloud. Hubs is a social WebXR platform initially designed for meetings and social gatherings that allows the upload of virtual environments as GLB files that can be interlinked through hyperlink portals. We chose Hubs Cloud as it allows users to insert and pin their own content to the rooms from services such as Google Poly, Sketchfab, Bing Images, Giphy, and more (see Fig. 2). Each of these service libraries offer vast amounts of content that offer the participant a high degree of customizability of their VMP. It is worth noting, however, that the participants could only furnish the environments and not change the spatial layout of the rooms themselves. We gave each participant access to their private VMP, comprising seven rooms interconnected by a lobby with portals (see Fig. 3). The participants were given a URL to their own instance of this VMP that they could enter through the Oculus Browser on the Oculus Quest, a stand-alone 6DOF HMD. The participants could navigate in the environment by physically walking (naturally limited by their physical context); by means of teleportation, or by using the joystick on the hand controllers.

Fig. 2

The content library UI for furnishing the VMPs

Fig. 3

Lobby room

3.2 Participants and context

Ten participants were recruited through posters on the University campus and e-mails distributed through the University intranet. Apart from our wanting to recruit students, we did not have any exclusion criteria apart from seeking a gender balance in the participant group. None of the participants owned a VR head-mounted display themselves; but some of the participants had used VR before (namely Tia, Beth, Ryan, Andrea, Matilda).

The context is naturally strongly tied to the participants: our participants were students and the tool was to be used in relation to their study regimen. The students borrowed the Oculus Quest for eight weeks so that they could use it in their homes or bring it with them to wherever they found it applicable.

Naturally, the situatedness of our participants’ use of their VMPs was also determined by their partaking in our study and the task we gave them. Here, we wanted our participants to feel free to explore various trajectories for use, utilising the knowledge they developed by using the VMP in their contexts over time to adapt their approach. This approach allows the product to find its stabilities in a context, which we understand as an open inquiry-driven approach (Hauser et al. 2018) from which to gain further research questions and directions of research. Here, as part of our exploratory approach, we did not want to constrain our participants’ imagination or hinder their ability to contribute with their own ideas by giving them a rigorous task. Our approach can be seen as actively incorporating, or welcoming, multistability in the research product to explore a broader range of potential use cases. Framed otherwise, we did not seek to stabilise the role of the VR application by instructing the participants’ use through strict rules or guidelines. This approach is in motivation comparable to participatory design processes that want to utilise participants’ tacit knowledge and expertise in exploring a design or use case and is perhaps best described as a “participatory speculation [method] to design meaningful relations” (Frauenberger 2019, p. 22).

For this reason, we relate to the concept of the VMPs in an expanded way where the students themselves could contribute to its role or definition, and its bounds are therefore not necessarily limited to how the MOL is traditionally used. What we mean by this in practice is that the participants could define the role of the virtual environment more or less as they wished, within the broader focus of approaching the creation of meaningful, personal virtual worlds of information related to their everyday study regimen. This approach is further comparable to the idea of “technology probes” in HCI, which are defined more by their flexibility than their usability (Hutchinson et al. 2003). Technology probes are “open-ended with respect to use, and users should be encouraged to reinterpret them and use them in unexpected ways” (Hutchinson et al. 2003, p. 19).

When giving the task to the students, therefore, we explained that our primary interest was not to measure memory retention and that there would be no ‘test’ or explicit measure of the extent to which the tool allowed them to recall particular objects. We did, however, as part of the introductory interview, explain the Method of Loci to the participants. This was a brief explanation given orally in the beginning of the interview, equally as much intended to be instructional as it was providing a context for the study as a whole. Here we explained how the MOL utilized visuospatial associations to aid recall and how this was the underlying logic of our Immersive VR application. More detailed instructions on how to interactively place assets such as 3D objects at various locations in the virtual environment was provided through a link to a ten minute video tutorial made by the first author. We did not train the participants in making complex information abstract through associations, and we did not give a hands-on tutorial on how to use the VMP during the first interview. It is worth re-iterating that although we explained the workings of the MOL, our main focus was to communicate to the participants that they would be engaged in a creative task to explore potential avenues for using VMPs as part of their study regimen and that we were chiefly interested in how their relationship would develop towards the VMP. We were not interested in any memory retention scores as such.

3.3 Data collection

3.3.1 The VR go-along

In order to gain an understanding of our participants’ VMPs, as well as their experience of being in and interacting with them, we conducted go-along interviews inside the participants’ respective VMPs. Studying VR mediation from a postphenomenological perspective entails studying the constituted user-environment relation (Vindenes and Wasson, 2021a), i.e., who the user becomes in relation to the virtual environment, and what the virtual environment is for the user (see Fig. 4).

Fig. 4

Overview of user-environment relations (Vindenes and Wasson 2021a)

Here, the user is conceived of as the participant embodied in VR and the relationship to the virtual environment is determined by the constraints and affordances that the user experiences from her situated standpoint. The VR Go-along method is deemed suitable for inquiring into these user-environment relations, as it involves querying and observing the user in their relation to the virtual environment, which is well aligned with our research goals. Go-along interviewing is an explorative, qualitative interviewing method open to spontaneous reactions from the interlocutors, where the environment in which they are present can shape the course of the interview (Vindenes and Wasson, 2021b). The method combines interviewing and observation while being mobile in a virtual environment. As go-along interviews can access the participants’ experiences when present in and interacting with their environment, we reasoned the method as suitable for understanding their relationship with their VMP. In addition to the benefit it provided in making it easier to conduct research during the COVID-19 pandemic, having the participant guide us through their furnished VMP made it easier for us to gain an understanding of their VMP, as it sometimes was filled with associations unintelligible without an interpreter, i.e., the students to whom the associations were meaningful. The VR Go-along interviews were conducted semi-structurally to be open to allowing the participant, as well as the virtual environment, to influence the flow of the interview.

As the study was conducted over eight weeks, we chose to distribute the interviews accordingly. We wanted to gain access to the unfolding of their sense-making as they developed a relationship to the application, not just their overall experience in retrospect. For this reason, we conducted a total of four interviews; (1) an introductory physical sit-down interview at the start of the study, (2) a VR Go-along interview after four weeks, (3) a VR go-along interview after eight weeks, and (4) a final retrospective interview regular sit-down interview at the end of the study.

The go-along interviews ranged from ten to fifty-eight minutes and were recorded audiovisually from the first-person perspective of the author conducting the interviews. The interviews were transcribed textually, with gestures and events being added to the text during the transcription of the video material into text. Concretely, the following question focused our analysis: “What relationship does the participant have to the VMP, and how did they experience integrating it into their study practice?” Results from the analysis are presented as illustrative textual accounts (see section “Participant Stories”) to provide an overview of each participant’s general experience and practice with the VMPs. The interview and analysis were performed by the first author.

4 Results

In this section, we present an overview of our participants’ experiences. We do this by telling the story of each participant’s journey in sequence instead of organising participant accounts categorically. As our participants’ experiences in and practice with the VMPs differed significantly, we found this to be the best way of illustrating their different journeys in exploring the use and integration of VMPs as part of their everyday. In Sect. 5 of Discussion, however, we bring up the broader themes that emerged from our participants’ experiences and discuss these in light of postphenomenological theory.

4.1 Participant stories

This section presents the participant stories of nine participants; for an overview see Table 1¹.² While we have strived to represent each user’s experience equally, some participant stories are significantly longer than others. Longer stories are typical of those participants who had positive experiences and, for this reason, utilised the VMP more. In these cases there was simply more to talk about during the interview. Also, the participants who had more success in establishing a practice in using the VMP had more intricate use of associations which took time to explain. For this reason, there is an imbalance in the length of the participant stories that favour those who developed a productive practice with their VMPs.

Table 1 Overview of Participants

4.1.1 Ryan

Ryan, a student in Information Science, found it hard to find a constructive use scenario for his case. Although he found the natural interaction of VR to be intuitive, he explained how he was far more experienced in working with PCs through keyboards and mice, and interacting in his VMP involved more ‘manual labour’: “It is too hard to use. It is not hard, but it is hard in comparison to the alternative.” While he reported having a very good ‘mental image’ of the various rooms that he performed activities in, such as organising quizzes for himself (see Fig. 5), due to COVID-19 all his exams were done at home, which meant that he no longer had any use for memorisation. Ryan noted how the difficulty of use was related to the fact that the medium of VR was not as incorporated into his everyday study practice as other media such as laptops and smartphones were: “…many of the things we do on the computer is not just about school. You sort of bring your computer and phone everywhere. And it may be easier to switch between tasks, you are already on the computer and can do some tasks there, or check your e-mail. I am never inside VR except for this purpose.”

Fig. 5

Ryan’s wall with learning material and a quiz

4.1.2 Beth

Beth, an undergraduate student in Cognitive Science, had been particularly excited to join the study. While she initially spent time in the VMP a lot over the first few days, she eventually had an episode of simulator sickness, which made her hesitant to enter the VMP again: “Well, it was very, very, fun in the beginning. It was VR glasses and you could have your own study rooms, hang things on walls, find out everything yourself… but then I became sick that one time so I was afraid of using it in a way […] When I took it off, I did not want to look at any screen, I just wanted to turn off all the lights and go to bed.” Beth reduced her usage and only dared to use it in the evenings when there was no chance it would ruin an otherwise productive day of studying. When she did use it, she found it hard to use for her programming courses but used it to brainstorm on an assignment that she was writing. She said it was helpful to have a distraction-free environment where she could not use her phone and had dedicated time to a project. Generally, however, she struggled with making sense of the task for her courses in a productive way, partly attributed to her fear of entering VR and becoming sick. The interviews with her were also relatively short for this same reason.

4.1.3 Terence

Terence, an undergraduate student in Cognitive Science, had a more positive experience. In the beginning, he had created a room to gain an overview of an assignment he was writing: “Here, you have it all in one room, very clear. If I am going to look at the categories in the assignment, there are maybe many pages of material […] So it is very practical, having everything available in one gaze.”

Terence noted how being in the virtual environment affected how he approached his task: “When I come in here, I think in a different way.” For Terence, the fact that the VMP primarily allowed only visual content integration (i.e., not text) helped defining the role of his VMP: “Information that is essential enough, I can put in a room. Like, ‘I would want to keep this’ […] It may have helped me be more selective at what kind of information that I wish to keep. This takes more energy to set up, but it sticks better than notes.”

He compared the activity to making a scrap book, adding that it was “very fun and very creative.” He chose to contrast this with his previous attempts at using the MOL traditionally: “I had heard about it before and tried to do it mentally earlier. But it was a bit too abstract, and I couldn’t. For me, it became a sequence of objects, it did not become a route that I felt I could naturally walk around in. So having something to actually look at like this environment offers, was very cool to try, because it is kind of the same principle just done in a different way.” He went on to note that, based on his earlier experiments with the MOL, he did not like to use environments that already had a sedimented meaning for him, such as his home: “if you build a Memory Palace in your apartment then there is a lot of details there from beforehand, like a TV and a sofa that is already there.” While he described the various rooms in the VMP as ‘sterile’ they nevertheless became meaningful in the end: “You spend time in the rooms and get attached to them. It becomes a small part of you.”

In one of the rooms, Terence had used a table to organise what he called “The Pillars of Cognitive Science” (see Fig. 6), using six pillars and associations to overall themes in the course: “I feel that it works very well as a memory palace. I do not use any energy to remember those things. […] When I see the images, there is a very strong association to the various elements of cognitive science.” Reflecting on his progress, and different practice over the various rooms, he stated: “It has been a learning curve […] I have become better at structuring the information and making it more available to myself […] When I had it split into six parts, it became much more clear to me what the course is all about, what elements there are in the course.”

Fig. 6

Pillars of cognitive science

Upon being asked how it is different from writing notes, he answered: “Taking notes feel easier. But notes can quickly become messy. There is more structure and insight in this room. […] It is a bigger project making an element and adjusting it. You have it in mind for a longer time than when you are just scribbling down a note in four seconds. It requires more thinking and you use your body to adjust it. It was important to me that it should be nice and straight.”

While Terence found the creative process of finding an image or object to represent the information to be challenging, this was not necessarily negative: “It makes me think about it two times. […] The more I think about it the more fruitful it becomes.”

4.1.4 Ben

For Ben, the experience of partaking in the study was also enjoyable. As a 4th-year law student who took media studies courses on the side, Ben had long days and was highly interested in optimising his study routine: “What this ended up becoming, since I had long days at the university, my life was for three weeks to wake up, go to the university and study, work out, buy fast food, go home, eat and go to bed. So I used this to squeeze out what I had learned that day but struggled to recall.” Ben found using the VMP to work very well for memorisation. He had organised content in four different rooms, where each room served to categorise different law cases that he ‘for some unknown reason’ struggled to recall: “For me, this is repetitive, to make it stick. This is not the place I go to learn new things and there will not come in things here that I already remember. Like this room, there is something I have noticed through my exam period that never sticks. … Then I have been able to dig it out of memory and attach it to an association, and it has not been a problem remembering it later.”

The go-along interviews often involved the participants giving rather long introductions to the courses they were taking to convey what the associations meant to them. It became clear that the images and 3D objects were for them associations to greater pieces of knowledge that was necessary to explain to convey the full significance of the association and its structure. This was particularly the case with Ben, who had used simple 3D models and combinations of images to represent law verdicts (see Fig. 7). For instance, he had used several objects to represent a law verdict he called ‘real dry rot sentence.’ Here, he had attached an image of money to represent price reduction and a clock to represent the time since purchase, factors that were relevant to the outcome of the verdict. He had also added a picture of an old house to symbolise the dry rot itself: “That one does not load though, but I still know that is what it represents and it’s kind of OK.”

Often, however, a single object was used to represent a law verdict, such as a 3D model of a screw nut, which for Ben acted as an association to a law verdict in a case where a specific company bought nuts from another company that failed to produce them correctly. In this association, as with the other associations, it became clear that Ben knew a lot about all the intricate details of this case and its importance and that the 3D model of a screw nut only served as an association for recalling that information from memory.

Fig. 7

Ben’s association to a particular verdict (depicts a woman stealing a phone)

In relation to study practice, Ben noted that the tool inspired new ways of studying for him and that the practice altered his ways of thinking: “I notice that when I am reading at the faculty, reading about a new sentence or something like that, I think more visually than earlier. I sort of ‘catch an image’, and think that it is a good image for that sentence in a way.”

He also noted that he enjoyed the concreteness of the activity and its result: “As a student it is often hard to point at what one has done in a day, it is reading, note-taking and repetition. It can sometimes feel empty and not so giving. Then it can be nice with a couple of minutes of visual thinking.” That being said, with his busy days, Ben would like the barrier of entry to be lower, so that the VMP could be more seamlessly integrated into what he otherwise was doing: “It requires some setup to get going, which makes the ‘door step mile’ a bit long some times. So I am experiencing a bit of ‘aaaaah’, it takes me sort of a long time to do the things I want to do.”

4.1.5 Andrea

For Andrea, who was in the process of writing her master’s thesis in work and organisation psychology, the experience was frustrating: “No, I don’t think it has gone as well as I’d liked it to […] I have gone in, and I’ve not found a good way to use it in the course of study which I’m at now. I really miss being able to write in here, I have thought a lot about that, I wish I had a keyboard, because using the pen is really hard.” She found it challenging that all the other learning activities, such as reading and writing, happened outside of the virtual environment and that she had to abandon her general approach to studying to enter: “There are many concrete obstacles that make it so that it is such a nuisance to interrupt the learning process I am in, to go in here. So I have to read and take it from memory. That is OK sometimes, but otherwise I have a constant need for information, and I can’t get that in here.”

While she said she enjoyed the idea of the creative task, her ideas could not be implemented into the VMP as she did not find a way of getting documents into the VMP and found the pen to be hard to use for her intended purposes. This must, of course, be understood in light of the fact that she was writing her master’s thesis: “As we discussed the last time, too, if I had been in a process of memorising for an exam this would have been more favorable. Now I just have to read a lot and write.” In conclusion, Andrea found no viable role for the VMP as part of her study regimen.

4.1.6 Tia

For Tia, who was enrolled in a one-year study to attain her postgraduate certificate in education, the experience was positive. She used one of the rooms to memorise the names of the students she taught in a class when completing the compulsory practical component of the course. While some participants found the task too open and creatively demanding, Tia did not mind: “I thought it was very nice. Just what is needed, free play.” She also found the VMP to be very effective for memorising: “It is kind of like … I have tried memory techniques with place attachment and so on before. So it was like having a physical version of that to a certain degree, but at the same time it is not a place you know that well as when you use [the MOL]. But the more time you spend there, the more clearly you can visualise it…” She noted that when she had used the traditional MOL earlier, she had organised her associations in sequence: “it has been along a line, you go sideways or ahead, but here you can suddenly place it wildly around you. Like in the other room, if I try to remember the names, I just stand and look around me. And it still has the same value as [the MOL] although it is just a room encompassing you.” Similarly to Terence, Tia noted how the room became personal for her, which she discovered when entering an empty room after having furnished the first one: “There was a difference in going from the room that was ‘mine’ to the other new environments. Once I started in there, it was my place, in a way.” She had put up a video for some relaxing background music, and had decorated the room with flying three-dimensional musical notes coming out of the tree in the centre of the room (see Fig. 8). While others found the lack of text to be a challenge, Tia did not. “No, I think that the text, that is something you already have. It may have been practical to be able to write, but I think what is best is the visual. That is what I would have used the most. If you write a lot of text on the wall then you would not remember it any better than if you wrote it on a sheet.” While she did not miss having a feature to enter raw text, she did some simple writing using the 3D pen. In pointing to something she had drawn, Tia noted something akin to what Ben did in regards to one of his associations that did not load: “It may not look like what I was trying to write, but I knew it myself. […] Like when you choose a picture to represent something, you know that it is what it is because you chose it. It is not like you forget it once you inserted it. When it is the first association you have it is a very good basis for remembering it.” When meeting with Tia again during the second VR Go-along interview, she expressed disappointment and explained that she was no longer able to spend time in the VMP because she had had several intense migraine attacks, for which having something pressing at the head emitting light was not an ideal combination. While she did not attribute the migraine attacks to VR, she found it hard to use as she was already trying to reduce screen time working as a teacher from home, as too much screen time exacerbated her attacks.

Fig. 8

Tia’s room used to remember names of students

4.1.7 Lawrence

Lawrence, an undergraduate student in Cognitive Psychology, found the creative exercise that the study involved to be challenging: “It became very emphasised that I was to take initiative for myself to be creative and that is hard to force when you should learn facts. It was hard to have the mental attitude that I ought to learn something at the same time as I was to be creative.” While he enjoyed spending time in VR, he found it hard to use it productively in a study regimen. “I think my brain associates video games and that kind of things with fun, and not necessarily learning. […] You sort of get a bit removed from the focus of work and organisation.” Lawrence also noted that he had become more busy than he expected to be and had not had time to use it very much. Eventually, he just went in there to scribble a bit, but did not pin anything to the VMP itself, i.e., he did not ‘save’ his work. In addition to his noting that he associated ‘games’ with fun, he attributed his lack of use or productive practice with the environment to the fact that he solely had programming courses, which were more hands-on and practically oriented, and did not require so much theoretical knowledge: “I think it might have worked better if I had had more reading courses. I have a lot of programming courses, a lot of it happens through programming, which I could not do inside there.” In conclusion, Lawrence had struggled to motivate himself to partake in the study and did not develop a positive relationship to his VMP. For this reason there was little in the VMP itself to discuss apart from the hurdles that he faced.

4.1.8 Lea

Lea, an undergraduate sociology student, also struggled to find a way to use the environment constructively. She had furnished one of the rooms with slides of statistical formulas but preferred watching these on a computer screen. For her, the project was not integrated into her study routine: “It was more like a side task, I know I should have tied it more [to the course], but I have not really done it.” She did not find any motivation for the project: “I feel that it takes more time for me to do it than what I get out of it. Then I would rather focus taking notes in OneNote where I learn it better.” Lea chose to not participate in the second go-along interview because she had not had any progress in her project. She did, however, participate in the final interview when handing in the equipment, where she stated: “I feel that if it was ready made and appropriate to my curriculum, I could use it but… it was just a hassle to make it myself and learn it.” In reflecting on the creative effort required by the participants, she said that on her part, the task was too open for her to know how to engage with it constructively. Particularly, she found the lacking ability to add text to be challenging: “It makes it so that you have to be very creative with what you put in […] my study is mostly based on text.”

4.1.9 Matilda

Matilda, an undergraduate student in Media Studies, came to develop a highly satisfactory relationship to her VMP, although she did not use it strictly as a study aid. Initially, she attempted to plan her assignments in the VMP but quickly abandoned it: “I figured I was going to try to do planning my assignments on here, but it didn’t really work out because it was too much of a hassle of going to my textbook, going to my notebook, writing my ideas in word documents. So this one I just dropped.” After briefly showing the room with the abandoned project, Matilda urged onwards to another room with a new project, where she had done far more work: “So this is just planning visually my months. To the end of the year its going to be super hectic, so I just planned it visually, what each month will consist of […] I really had fun in here.” She had chosen one of the larger environments for this, which had three rooms available, and referred to it as a vision board: “I felt overwhelmed with everything that I had going on, and still have going on, and dividing it into three months—three rooms—made it simpler to take on one at a time.”

She had filled her environment to the rim with images and 3D objects (see Fig. 9). The 3D objects usually served the role of giving a particular vibe to the room, whereas the images gave more particular expressions of things she had to focus on during the given period. In the October room, she had visualised a semester assignment she had to work on as well as a presentation on race/ethnicity. As mentioned, however, the vision board was not isolated to only study-relevant information: “And then just some things like for myself personally and family, I’m a good mom, lose that pregnancy weight, eat healthy.” As we moved from the October room, before we reached the stairs leading to the November room, she pointed to the walls: “This is just like … me: self care, some hobbies, sewing, gaming, meditation, and remember to relax.”

Fig. 9

Snapshot from Matilda’s November room

For Matilda, the experience had been one of creating a visual overview rendering her situation as more manageable: “This is just.. because it was so much stuff going on in my head, it was nice just to have it all written down. And have a good visual idea of what’s going on and how to divide everything.” Although memorisation as a term might be too narrow to capture Matilda’s use, she did have a good memory of the environment while she was no longer immersed: “it has helped to think of it like that, to think of it like: ‘go to your mind place, mind palace’, even though I’m not in VR, I can still refer to it in my head as two rooms, or two things, two different time periods or three different months, and divide it like that.”

Matilda had done a lot before our first go-along interview, and as the study came to an end, she had spent time erasing objects rather than adding new ones: “There wasn’t really that much more to do, I erased some pictures, I added stars like checkmarks to things I had completed. Just a few more things on November to study, like exam stuff. And then, it was just more like checking things off the list. Maybe if this was something that was continuous I could have gone further, but since I know that it’s going to end there is no need to plan January or February…” When asked what the environment was for her, she answered: “This environment? I think… It’s kind of like a little escape. I was going to say ‘out of mind’ but it’s not out of mind because it’s very ‘in mind’ and very visual.”

5 Discussion

From the standpoint of postphenomenology, the particular becoming of a technology is dependent on its contextual relations. In our study, we aimed to study the becoming of a VMP in a context of everyday self-directed studying. In the findings presented in the previous section, we saw a great variety in how the students experienced using and making sense of their VMPs as part of their everyday. For Andrea and Ryan, for instance, the experience was frustrating as VR was something which isolated them from their general context, while Matilda found this to be one of the main benefits. Further, the application’s visuospatial focus and creative demands were also experienced both positively and negatively by different participants. While Ben, Matilda, Terence and Tia enjoyed the creative task and found their associations to work well, Lea and Lawrence found creating visual associations challenging.

In this section, we discuss our participants’ diverging experiences and relations to their virtual environment in light of postphenomenological theory. Here, we explain how we understand constructing hermeneutical relations as a central topic for self-initiated construction of personal VMPs. As the creation of hermeneutical relations must be seen in light of how the participants experienced the affordances and constraints of the system, this section also discusses the embodiment of a user role in relation to the VMPs. By immersion into the VMP, the world and one’s general study context is inaccessible, and one has to achieve one’s goals with the technology and the limited options that it represents.

5.1 Constructing hermeneutical relations

Vindenes and Wasson (2021) describes VR postphenomenologically as constituting an embodiment-alterity relation; the embodied user stands in relation to the virtual environment with the world in the background, where the relationship between the user and the environment is defined by the affordances and constraints of the system. When embodying the user role, a ‘virtual subjectivity’ is constituted, the user is situated with particular abilities and her mediated intentional relation is directed towards the virtual environment. The authors note, however, that other relations can develop within this overarching embodiment-alterity relation. One can have particular relationships towards artefacts within the environment, but also, of course, stand in hermeneutical relations to the environment as a whole, i.e., relations to an abstract representation of the world that requires interpretation to be “read” (Verbeek 2005). From our findings, we can see that while all the participant stories display an embodiment-alterity relationship, only some of them indicate the development of a hermeneutical relation towards their curricula. In this section, we discuss factors we understand as related to a (un)successful constitution of a hermeneutical relationship towards the VMPs.

Ihde (1990) writes how, in “a hermeneutical relation, the world is first transformed into a text, which in turn is read” (p. 92). This transformation can take many forms, into numbers, text, or imagery, and this abstraction magnifies some features and reduces other features according to the “magnification/reduction structure” (Ihde 1990, p. 76) of the medium. The magnification/reduction structure of Immersive VR is heavily dependent on the particular application in question as VR is a highly flexible medium. In our case, the VMP as a medium has a directedness towards the creation of visuospatial elements as opposed to text-based, naturally strictly tied to the MOL of which the application in our study serves as a technological adaptation. Verbeek (2008) uses the term “composite intentionality” to designate technology relations in which “there is an interplay between human intentionality and the intentionalities of technologies themselves” (p. 388). For some of our participants, their composite intentionality as users in the VMP was conceived of positively as inviting this particular kind of engagement. In contrast, others experienced it as inhibiting the kind of engagement that they sought with the VMP, i.e., they experienced the composite intentionality as something positive or negative depending on whether their aim was at odds with the directedness of the VMP. The effects of the composite intentionality and particular magnification/reduction structure of the VMP were further characterised by the fact that interaction with the VMP was demanding both in terms of time and actual physical effort. This made participants reconsider what they should include, as it had to be ‘worth it’ to include in the VMP. For some participants this was seen as a constraint that was too large for the light to be worth the candle: “The computer itself appears in terms of its stubbornly limited options for interface; it is suddenly unable to mediate one´s experience in a meaningful way” (Rosenberger 2009, p. 178). For others, it was seen as helping them in only entering “essential enough” information that was worthy of inclusion.

What can be gathered from our findings concerning this point is that while our adaptation may be more faithful to the MOL as it is traditionally performed ‘non-mediated’, this approach to VMPs is also more demanding of the users. While the participants who successfully created hermeneutical representations in their VMP found them to be highly effective (as illustrated by Ben’s missing association and Andrea’s poor 3D drawing), others found the task too challenging.

The challenge that our particular adaptation of the MOL thus demands of the users is that of deciding an appropriate and meaningful magnification/reduction structure of the hermeneutical relation itself. This is what Ben referred to as ‘catching an image’, and this activity must be performed within the constraints of the interaction possibilities and content library of the application. Here, the composite intentionality arises in the relationship of the embodied user creating hermeneutical relations with and towards the environment. We discuss this aspect as “writing relations” in more detail in the next section.

5.2 Writing relations

In classic postphenomenological examples of hermeneutical relations (as well as in most literature on VMPs), the reader is seldom the creator of the text she reads. As Wellner (2017) points out, the hermeneutical relations mainly focus on the reading of the text, not the process of creation with the intellectual effort that is required at this writing phase; “an effort that runs in parallel to the embodied effort” (p. 210).

In both reading and writing hermeneutics, the “role of the ‘I’ is to impute meaning to that message-text” (Wellner 2017, p. 210). In our participants’ case, their experience of developing their VMP as something to which they could stand in a hermeneutical relationship was the critical aspect of their experience and can not as an act be separated from their reading it.

To account for this relationship, Wellner (2017) schematises a mode of writing where one is “thinking about the text, interacting with it, while the world withdraws to the background” as a kind of hybrid hermeneutical-alterity relation, where the user switches between the modes of reading and writing:

$$(I{-\!\!-}Tech){-\!\!-} > text\,\left( {{-\!\!-} > world} \right)$$

Here, the (I—Tech) denote that what is writing the text is the I and the technology in embodiment, whereas (— > World) signifies that the world is in the background, the result of which becomes “a mix of embodiment, alterity, and hermeneutic relations” (p. 218). In our participants’ writing relations with their VMP, the world is in a background in more than a merely focal sense; due to the immersion, it is entirely visually absent. The participant engages with the VR system, embodying parts of it and negotiating (sometimes frustratingly) with it during the constructive hermeneutical process.

In VMPs, the environment is transformed hermeneutically into visuospatial imagery representing a world of meaning. While the intended meaning of this representation might be guessed (which the researcher conducting the interviews frequently at least attempted), the order is only really known by its author, not just because they are the ones for whom the associations are meaningful: the world that it represents is similarly their own. This can be contrasted with studies cited in the Background section, where the user stands in a more typical ‘reading’ scenario in which she has to learn the associations created by the researchers and incorporate them; they do not come from and to her as already meaningful. In a way, therefore, the challenges of hermeneutical relations as traditionally conceived of—where they would lie in the reading of the hermeneutical relation—is in a way reversed in our configuration. Indeed, the challenge lies in the creation of hermeneutics; once the meaning has been made, it has solid roots and seems not to be easily forgotten.

Our findings suggest that entering into a practice wherein one constructs one’s own hermeneutical relations might be more complex and require more of the participant. However, the process will likely be more rewarding if this effort is put forth. If, as Lea requested, one could get something “ready-made”, it might be easier to streamline the process but the VMP would exist very differently and most likely not have the same foothold as the hermeneutical relations that one creates for oneself. That being said, it becomes too simplistic to attribute the distinction between the successful and non-successful attempts to engage constructively in writing relations to mere “effort”. The question rather becomes what factors were involved in the non-successful attempts which rendered any effort to be seen as a waste of time and thus not followed through. Here, we wish to highlight two aspects in particular: (1) the world being in the background of the writing relation as well as (2) the alignment of user intentionality and technological directnedness in the composite intentionality.

5.2.1 The world as background

As we mentioned, when engaging in the construction of hermeneutical relations in VR, the world is in the background in a more radical sense. The world being in the background is not an issue when performing the traditional MOL, nor is it as relevant when participants enter into VMPs pre-made by researchers or designers. In our case, because the process was self-directed by the students, the immersion of the VMP broke the possibility of engaging with their general study context.

The issues resulting from the world being in the background is an almost ironic and obvious hurdle, as when participants enter into the VMP to memorise information, they naturally do not have access to this information cognitively in memory after immersion. Suppose they have this information as notes or search for it on the Internet. These are all activities traditionally performed outside of VR, and the VR immersion itself becomes an obstacle which separates them from the information they want to work with.

5.2.2 User intentionality versus technological directness

In terms of composite intentionality, it is not just the ‘technological directnedness’ that is relevant for writing relations to VMPs. Central to many of our participants’ unsuccessful attempts at developing a productive practice in their VMPs was that they did not have to memorise information as part of their study regimen. This was either because they did not have to memorise information due to COVID-19 home exams, or that they were writing assignments or studying more practically oriented skills such as programming. Here, the plans and potential ideas of the participant quickly become at odds with the technological directedness of the VMP. While it was our intention to not exclude any students for the sake of variety, we realise that the creative exercise in these participants’ cases can be seen as too demanding or even hopeless, and there are, of course, disciplines and activities that are not as likely to benefit from the MOL. Future studies with a more homogenous group that is known to be in need of memorisation would thus complement our study, and would be able to shed light on how self-initiated use of the VMPs can unfold when the objective is more clear for the student and the same across all participants. That being said, we do believe that there is merit to exploring the use of VMPs for “broader” use cases, and that this tool can also have potential beyond studying. From our own findings, we can see how Matilda early on realised that the tool was not ideal for writing assignments, but nevertheless found a practice in her VMP that she valued greatly, where the VMP became a kind of visual life-planner filled with goals, positive reinforcement; a kind of meditative recreation. Exploring such use cases more explicitly could be interesting for future work. To provide a few examples here, researchers have shown, for instance, that the MOL can effectively increase the recall of self-affirming personal memories for individuals with depression (Dalgleish et al. 2013), and other creative adaptations have explored the MOL for password input on smartphones (Das et al. 2019). While the method is known for its impressive feats of rote memorisation from memory competitions and the like, exploring adaptations that are more tailored to individual users’ lifeworlds would be interesting to see in future work.

6 Summary

In summary, we regard supporting writing relations as a central issue in exploring continual adaptations of the MOL to VR. Questions that can emerge for future explorations is how one can bridge the gap between our real and virtual environments, how to find an optimal fit between natural interaction and efficiency in virtual environments, as well as how one can design for a suitable ‘composite intentionality’ between the creative freedom of the user and different versions of ‘directnedness’ on behalf of the application. This could be explored either through instruction or support from the application itself, or in terms of tasks from the researchers within more concretised study configurations.

7 Conclusion

The research presented in this article serves as an initial exploration of the use of VMPs in-the-wild. By giving participants a VR Head-Mounted Display through which they could access and furnish their own VMP over two months, we were able to explore individual and contextual factors that come into play when a VMP is approached as a personal project amid an already-established study routine. Our study provides insight into how VMPs can be utilised in ways that go beyond the rote memorisation of lists, instead representing information that is meaningful for the participant. Based on our findings from a series of interviews with participants, we found a great variety in our participants’ experiences. In making sense of the disparity of our results, we discuss writing relations as a critical issue to be attentive to when designing new adaptations of the MOL to VR. While our adaptation could be said to be more ‘true’ to the original MOL, this also entails that the undirected activity of constructing VMPs was more challenging for the students. The contribution of this article is the insight it provides into the becoming of a VMP in a context of a self-initiated study regimen, as well as our discussion of factors related to an (un)successful constitution of a hermeneutical relationship to VMPs. Based on the insights from our analysis, we discuss ideas for future work with more homogenous groups in need of memorization, as well as explorations for VMP use that explicitly go beyond that of studying.