Our reality emerges together with the spaces and places around us. The same story can leave a different impression, and be easier or harder to recall, depending on where we heard it. It is known that we remember things more easily when we are in the same place or situation in which we learned them, a phenomenon called context-dependent memory. Just as visiting a familiar place can bring back past events, our memory and understanding are tied to places. Our sense of which direction we are walking and how far we have traveled is also strongly influenced by what we see around us.
Virtual reality and augmented reality technologies allow us to reshape the very spaces and places people find themselves in. For example, if the visible scenery is rotated gradually, people walk in a circle while believing they are walking straight ahead. By exploiting this tendency, we can create the experience of walking freely through a virtual space far larger than the physical room (redirected walking). By reconstructing lost buildings and historical streetscapes, or by presenting museum objects within the settings where they were originally used, we can also let people experience history and culture together with the places where they unfolded.
We study the mechanisms by which experiences of perception, memory, and movement arise through our engagement with spaces and places, and we apply these mechanisms in engineering to design redirected walking techniques, as well as digital museums and AR exhibitions that convey the value of historical and cultural spaces.
