3D Spatial Memory

In this game, users had to remember the location of colored cubes floating in front of them. After a few seconds, the cubes would reset and users had to move them back to their original position. By comparing the original cube locations to where users put them back, we could precisely measure 3D spatial memory.

Psychological research is all about testing people. You might test someone's memory by having them remember a list of words, or test their visual acuity by having them find an object in a picture. Such tests are usually done on a computer screen or with paper and pencil, which is quite artificial. This is where VR comes in.

3D spatial memory is inherently, well, 3D. You could try and measure it with a 2D test, but it wouldn't tell you what you really wanted to know. After all, the brain knows when it's looking at a flat image. With VR, we can present objects in a 3D environment and measure precisely how well you remember their location.

This experiment let us test 3D spatial memory in a way that matches the real world. The power of presence, combined with natural gestures, let us measure the unmeasurable. In other words, it's something you can only do in VR.