A Study of the Influence of Different Reading Mediums on a User’s Memory of Received Content

ABSTRACT

        In the past, due to the cost of the hardware parts in Virtual Reality (VR) being extremely high, they could only be used in medical science, military, industry and construction industry.VR had less development towards the mass market. In recent years, due to the cost of VR hardware going down as well as the progress in related technology and hardware, more large companies are funding development into this field. To name a few examples: In 2014, Facebook bought Oculus and sales have begun as of early 2016. HTC and Valve collaborated to create the Vive. Sony is developing a VR headset for its PS4 console. Samsung is also developing for the GEAR VR. All of these VR technologies are growing more and more complete. There are also an increasing number of VR users. There are already many VR related applications on Oculus Home. The industry is gradually developing content suitable to be experienced by normal consumers, but there currently almost no applications properly designed for reading.

        Our research designs a VR reading application using a head­mounted display to simulate traditional book reading and projector watching while also creating a surrounding scene in parts of the stories, to let the users feel as if they are in the story’s world and can interact with it. We hope that through VR we can strengthen the user’s impression of the stories while reading or watching. At the same time, we will compare the user’s memory of received content between ordinary paper books, electronic books (e­book) and e­books with head­mounted display VR.

        Our research uses different mediums of reading to determine the memorize influence between different reading device, using reading test scale as our research tool to analysis the different between paper books, e­book and e­book with head­mounted display VR in memory memorize. Also, we invite experts to check our content validity, to fix the semantic confusion and speak improperly problems. In order to know the reliability and validity of these evaluation scale, we ask university students to do pre­test, using test­retest reliability and split­half reliability to test the stability and consistency.

        Our research is based on quasi­experimental designs, chooses 18­24 ages university students as our target, separate them into 3 groups (paper books, e­book and e­book with head­mounted display VR) by drawing lots, to do pre­test and post­test, and use two way mixed design ANOVA to verify the independent variable. Our research analysis and discuss the data through the method above, to compare the different influence in memorize of reading moods with different reading device.