Implicit and Explicit Information Mediation in a Virtual Reality Museum Installation and its Effects on Retention and Learning Outcomes

Much research is currently being done in the area of Virtual Reality. This is due to the imminent release of several new pieces of gaming hardware that promises to bring the Virtual Reality (VR) experience into the homes and public spaces of ordinary people. This study attempts to build on the established literature to create a new form of game-technology based museum learning experience which uses VR to give the user a chance to visit the past. Greve Museum has been looking for a new way to visualize historical places like Mosede Fort, an old World War I battery south of Copenhagen in Denmark and the application developed for this study is a game-based Virtual Reality experience, which places the user at this Fort during World War I using the Oculus Rift Head Mounted Display. The application development was based on theories from other
works concerned with education theory in games as well as engagement theory. The experiment explored the amount of knowledge retained, depending on how the information was mediated through the game. One version of the game had all the information given by a narrator and the other worked entirely through dialogue and other diegetic sources. The findings indicate that the implicit procedure only was a tad better suited for information retention overall, but that the explicit procedure gave the user a chance to gain better understanding of the situation. The study furthermore leads to several areas of discussion; partly how the setup affected people positively but also possible future aspects for the implementation.