Just had an idea for increased immersion to facilitate learning kanji and I could not find any previous posts about it, so here it goes:

Also, my apologies in advance for this wall of text in my first ever post!

Idea:

There is this new 300 dollar virtual reality head mounted display called the oculus rift that has a very wide field of view and low latency head tracking. Due to the large field of view you almost see nothing else but the gaming world once you put the headset on. This, combined with the low latency (the display updates almost as fast as your head movement) gives you the feeling you are really inside and immersed into whatever environment the headset is displaying.

In my view the device could also be used as a study tool. You could made a virtual japanese environment with a free or low-cost 3d software package, and then "step" into it and use a part of the environment (say a wall) to display kanji flashcards. The immersion of being completely inside a Japanese environment and the absence of any distractors would then hopefully allow kanji to be learned more easily. My idea is really rough around the edges, but I think this could be an interesting experiment.
What do you think?

I should note that the oculus rift is not a consumer product yet. Developer kits are available though. Since the headset is still in the development stage it has some issues that are being worked on, one of them being a low display resolution. Individual pixels are visible at the moment. This particular issue is very likely to be fixed in the next version of the device, hopefully due out by summer next year. The current resolution limitation means you would have to project the kanji into the 3d world (say on a wall or something) rather big for them to be completely readable.

If people are unfamiliar with the oculus rift and are interested I would be more than happy to post a few links about it.

This is a really interesting idea. I think it would be great if anki could be displayed in it. All outside sights and sounds are shut out, and you just focus totally on your reviews for a set time. It would probably really help concentration a lot, especially for those of us who have trouble focusing.

There's lots of interesting stuff you could do with the occulus rift. Essentially pretty gimmicky stuff, but they might make SRS more interesting to the average person. The emphasis would have to be on the 3-D stuff. I was thinking what if you had full 3-D environments that you could wander around and identify objects to test your vocab. Anything that could have a visual prompt (mostly nouns) could be tested that way. You have a free-wandering mode where you learn new words and maybe export them to anki for review or maybe it could have an internal SRS.
The point is, it should be something to make review/study more interesting and engaging.

Haych Wrote:I was thinking what if you had full 3-D environments that you could wander around and identify objects to test your vocab. Anything that could have a visual prompt (mostly nouns) could be tested that way. You have a free-wandering mode where you learn new words and maybe export them to anki for review or maybe it could have an internal SRS.
The point is, it should be something to make review/study more interesting and engaging.

I like your idea. Technical issues like processing power aside there are no limits to what you can do in VR, which is what makes the oculus rift and the realness it provides so exciting. Just one of many possibilities: Imagine learning new vocab in "real" context, say when you for instance try to memorize fish kanji in a japanese supermarket setting (weird example, I know). This could make it a lot more fun and memorable since you are involving your senses more.

As for the realness and thereby hopefully the potential for better learning this popular video of a 90 year old woman trying the oculus rift for the first time is quite telling:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAC5SeNH8jw

[ファブリス]

Haych Wrote:There's lots of interesting stuff you could do with the occulus rift

Oh I'm sure Japan will find lots of interesting stuff to do with it

VR VNs sound fun

This is interesting.

I would like a SAO environment or any RPG world setting wherein I have to defeat a Kanji or vocab or whatever topic I am currently learning monster, gain exp and level up. haha

I think developing a whole virtual world just for the sake of SRSing kanji might be a little silly though. Japanese schoolkids are highly immersed in Japanese, but it doesn't make them particularly fast at learning kanji.

I suppose it might improve concentration, but an important part of the learning process is mechanically writing out characters, which doesn't work so well if you have a headset on...

dizmox Wrote:I think developing a whole virtual world just for the sake of SRSing kanji might be a little silly though. Japanese schoolkids are highly immersed in Japanese, but it doesn't make them particularly fast at learning kanji.

I suppose it might improve concentration, but an important part of the learning process is mechanically writing out characters, which doesn't work so well if you have a headset on...

Haha yeah. I don't think this should be your only learning tool. Just a supplement whenever you are bored. I also like to write the kanji by hand.

I've been following the Oculus Rift since the kickstarter (even ordered a dev kit). Until the Rift, the idea of VR was limited because you either had cheap, gimicky items or gear that cost $10,000+ and might not deliver the goods. Now we've got a device that not only seems to be the real deal, but can be offered at a reasonable price making it a consumer item.

Since it is the best bet at being widely marketed, that means we're going to see all sorts of development that goes beyond taking a first person shooter and jamming it into a VR headset. There's experiments with therapy treatment of phobias and PTSD, training with high risk skills, perspective shifts on top of importing other forms of games to be workable using these headsets. Expect great things to come out over the next two years.

As for the subject, I wonder if someone will develop a Virtual Memory Palace used in part for kanji learning. The Palace is as big as you want it to be. In each room you can populate as you see fit. There'll be 3d objects you can manipulate with the Razor Hydra controllers (best way currently to simulate hand movements in the Rift). These objects could be Kanji, radicals, Heisig's primitives, etc. And by objects I mean not just 3d version of the Kanji but virtual objects that represent their meanings. So you can call up a Camp Fire, a Drumstick and a Puppy then arrange them so you visually see your visual story (maybe the puppy is holding the drumstick and cooking it on the campfire for the "sort of thing" you train your dogs to do).

Obviously this is beyond me, but I can see memory researchers attempting things like this. I can imagine Anki interfacing with a virtual memory palace where if you miss a card and want to review the lesson, you're shown the path to the room where you stored that "card". However, what sounds cool might not be cool once implemented.

Nukemarine Wrote:So you can call up a Camp Fire, a Drumstick and a Puppy then arrange them so you visually see your visual story (maybe the puppy is holding the drumstick and cooking it on the campfire for the "sort of thing" you train your dogs to do).

Obviously this is beyond me, but I can see memory researchers attempting things like this.

Good ideas.
The nice thing is that it wouldn't necessarily take a memory researcher to try and find out what works best. To give an example, there is this soon to be kickstarted software package called MakeVR that makes it really easy and intuitive to make 3d objects. You could easily import freely available 3d models too. The software uses the razer hydra and will fully support the oculus rift. A teaser vid of MakeVR: