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People recall information better after viewing it in an immersive virtual environment than they do when using a desktop display, according to recent research conducted at the University of Maryland, College Park. Volunteers first studied printouts of two 21-image sets of famous faces, such as Napoleon, Gandhi, Mickey Mouse, George Washington, and Marilyn Monroe. They were then shown one set of faces placed throughout one of two “memory palaces,” either an ornate palace or a medieval townscape. After five minutes to navigate and study the memory palace and then a two-minute break, the subjects re-entered the memory palace, where the faces had been replaced by numbers, and were asked to recall which faces had been in which positions. Half of the participants viewed the scene first using a virtual-reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) and then a desktop computer display with mouse-based interaction; the other half used the desktop first and then the HMD. “The users that used the HMD fir...

With so many students being avid gamers, providing coursework within video games offers a chance to make learning more relevant and show how the concepts being studied can be applied outside the classroom. To that end, Texas A&M University, College Station, gave researchers a $100,000 grant to commercialize 3-D video games in calculus and art history/appreciation as supplements to standard coursework. The games are offered by Triseum LLC , a company that grew from the Texas A&M Department of Visualization’s Learning Interactive Visualization Experience (LIVE) Lab . Triseum’s CEO is also founder and director of the LIVE Lab and an assistant professor teaching game design and development at the university. In Variant: Limits, players work to save a fictional planet from imminent destruction by assisting the game’s protagonist in solving a series of increasingly complex calculus problems. Prompts within the game allow students to refresh themselves on theory or firm up the concept...

At the end of January, Google for Education unveiled a beta program that will allow instructors and students to craft their own immersive virtual-reality (VR) experiences using a Google app and a 360-degree camera. Many classrooms already employ the Google Expeditions teaching tool to explore the world and outer space virtually via mobile devices and VR viewers. However, a “create your own” experience was the feature most requested by students and educators. The beta will allow participants to upload 360-degree images to the Google app and then annotate them with videos, two-dimensional images, and descriptive text to enhance the experience. Ease of use is designed into the program. “If you know how to type, you’re good to go,” Jennifer Holland, lead program manager for Google Expeditions and G Suite for Education, told Education Week . For schools that don’t have their own 360-degree cameras, Google will loan them devices for the duration of the beta.