Welcome to Memento! Are you ready to build your own virtual Memory Palace? Memory Palaces are useful tools to help you improve your memory by associating information with images and locations, usually familiar places that a person usually frequent such as at home or at the workplace. Memento allows you to prototype and build your own Memory Palace easily by using your iPad to take photos and add annotations and image layers on them. Instead on relying on your head, Memento allows you to express Memory Palaces visually and physically (on the iPad), making it easier for you to create them.
Device: iPad, iOS8. Camera and Photos Library Permissions Required
One of the most useful and widely used mnemonics (or memory aids) is the Memory Palace (also known as the Method of Loci) - a place or series of places in your mind where you can store information that you need to remember. With time and practice, anyone can build a Memory Palace, and they are useful for far more than just memory competitions and trivia.
To build a Memory Palace, a user will have to go through a series of places or “rooms” in logical order, and place or identify items in each “room” to be associated with a particular piece of information. This way, whenever the users enters this particular room, with enough familiarity, he or she will be able to remember through the associations that they have made earlier. Memento aims to train users to use this technique more often, as well as to create an easy way for users to create these memory palaces and storing them.
What we want to achieve with Memento is to create a smooth experience for users to go through the process of creating their own personal Memory Palaces to hold the information that they require. The app also gamifies the process of using a Memory Palace by providing some memory challenges for the user to solve. The user may attempt to solve classic memory competition challenges, such as remembering a long string of numbers, by making use of the Memory Palace functionality of the app. As such the user would not only be able to track the improvement in his memory after using the memory palace technique, but also be able to compare his memory against his friends who could also play similar challenges.
For one, it could be used for academic purposes in schools or self-learning.
History student Edgar laments his situation. He has chosen a content heavy major but as it turns out, he is more interested in the argumentative aspect of the course, and is not really good at the parts that require memory. He wants to find a way to improve his memory techniques, but do not quite know how to start. Using our app, he can easily create memory palaces for his own purposes and train himself to use these techniques better. Best of all, he can review this on his mobile device, to commit it to memory when he has the most idle time!
Other potential use cases include remembering names and learning of languages. There are already some applications offering lessons about different languages that uses similar mnemonic techniques for students. (Language do require a lot of memory work, not just understanding) Memory Palaces can be a very effective tool if done right for these use cases.
• Create a linear graph of images that are linked together by association
• Users can either take a photo or pull from Photos library for the base image of a room/node.
• Users can see the entirety of the graph in a UIScrollView from left to right.
• Users can edit any of the nodes by tapping on the particular node that they want to edit to go into edit mode.
• Users will be able to annotate parts of the image to be associated with information such as text
- Annotations can be colour coded
- Tap on “Annotation” mode button to bring all annotations to front
• Users will be able to reorder their annotations (to be useful in the game/replay mode)
- Tap on “Ordering” mode button to be able to swap the annotation order labels
• Users can add another image to be super imposed onto the base image as a “layer” in which the user can move around and place it in the desired location on the View.
- Layers can be resized
• Users will be able to save the current snapshot of the Palace Room and save into iOS Photos Library
• Users can edit their Palace Room Image using an integrated external image editor
• Taps onto the Memory Palace mode, user can attempt the challenges with their own created memory palaces
• 2 simple game modes, Order and Find
- Order - tap the annotations in the correct order
- Find - tap the annotation based on what is prompted
• User can choose to hide the annotations and layers to make it more challenging and to slowly commit it to their own memory
• Shows time taken to complete, number of errors made