Memory Palace VR

Memory Palace VR
<3
All this to open a door :(
Main Menu Screen: Choose Your Difficulty
Easy Memory List = 5 Objects
The Ol' Carrot In the Oven
Done!

Inspiration

College students have a lot to remember, from school assignments to textbook formulas to grocery lists. Personally, all of us have forgotten important info at unfortunate times--so we decided that our Swamphacks entry would try to solve that problem. By creating the Memory Palace VR we gave ourselves, and others like us, a tool to train our memory.

What it does

Memory Palace VR is a virtual reality trainer for the memory palace technique. In short, the memory palace technique is about mentally placing a list of objects you want to memorize inside a familiar location. Then you can "walk through" your palace to recall the list.

Our application allows you to train and simulate the memory palace technique in virtual reality. First you are greeted with the list of items to memorize. Teleport through the VR house scene and spawn in the items sequentially with "Grab". Feel free to store items in unusual locations like inside the oven to help you remember better! When you feel ready, you can grab "Done" and a blank version of the list will appear. See if you got them all :)

There are also options to choose from Easy (5 objects), Medium (10 objects), or Hard (20 objects) difficulty.

How we built it

We used Unity with the SteamVR Plugin to develop for the HTC Vive. This first involved importing models, assets, and scenes from the Unity store and organizing them into a randomized database to generate memory lists. Then we made everything interactable with VR inputs through C# scripts and SteamVR components. Lastly we created menus to transition between all scenes.

Challenges we ran into

Working with VR in Unity can be a nightmare with the amount of assets and plugins that need to work together. Frequently we ran into errors that had little to zero documentation, and we had to just try different things until we could continue.

Another big challenge was only having one VR headset to play around with. While one person could develop and test freely for the device, the others had to write their scripts on their own VRless devices, pray it would work, and wait to be able to test it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It was all our first time using Unity AND VR :), and we had a working demo in less than 36 hours!

What we learned

We learned a massive amount about how to use Unity and integrate Virtual Reality with it, which will allow us to make amazing projects in the future and continue to work on the memory palace in the future.

What's next for Memory Palace VR

Allowing users to import their own assets for different sets of objects
Showing user statistics, like time taken, games played, and number correctly memorized, etc.
Creating a leaderboard system which adds a competitive flavor to the game
Adding more maps
Integrating prebuilt standard memory challenges, like memorizing a deck of 52 cards

Team Leader: Eugene Li Discord: eugli#6355