Note-Taking in Virtual Reality Using Visual Hyperlinks and Annotations

Immersive virtual reality shows great promise for teaching and learning, but the question of how best to apply the powerful practice of note-taking has been explored very little. In non-VR settings, research has shown significant differences in learning outcomes depending on the usage of different styles of note-taking. Active “long-hand” notes sometimes work better than “verbatim” or typed notes, suggesting that in VR, recording and playback alone as a form of note-taking is unlikely to be optimal. We imagine a new form of active note-taking in VR that uses long-hand but also leverages recordings and original source learning materials. The approach is to use a virtual scrapbook that contains visual snapshots that function as hyperlinks along with hand-written notes. We hypothesize that this will be superior to either form of traditional note-taking for learning complex and abstract concepts. We discuss our work-in-progress towards building a note-taking system that will help test this hypothesis.