Designing a VR game for public speaking based on speakers features: a case study

Abstract

Oratory or the art of public speaking with eloquence has been cultivated since ancient times. However, the fear of speaking in public-a disproportionate reaction to the threatening situation of facing an audience-affects a very important part of the population. This work arises from the need to help alleviate this fear through a tool where to train the ability of public speaking. To this purpose, we built a virtual reality system that offers the speaker a safe environment to practice presentations. Since the audience is the only way to receive feedback when giving a speech, our system offer s a virtual audience that reacts and gives real-time feedback based on the emotions conveyed by three parameters: voice tone, speech content and speaker's gaze. In this paper, we detail the modelling of a behavioural-realistic audience just focusing on the speakers' voice tone: 1) by presenting an algorithm that controls the audience' reactions based on the emotions beamed by the speaker, and 2) by carrying out an experiment comparing the reactions generated by the agents with those of a real audience to the same speech, in order to refine the given algorithm. In this experiment, the audience subjects are asked to fill a questionnaire-level of engagement and perceived emotions-for a speech performed by professional actors representing different emotions. Afterwards, we compared the reactions of said audience with the ones generated by our algorithm, and used the results to improve it.

Glosofobia en la universidad. Oratoria online y covid-19

“…En esta misma línea de futuro y con el objetivo de combatir la glosofobia se podría plantear la utilización de programas de realidad virtual e inteligencia artificial como materiales formativos. De hecho, ya se está investigando en el desarrollo de algunos instrumentos automáticos, tipo juegos electrónicos (El-Yamri et al, 2019;Vishwanath, 2019). 2 ¿Considera que usted padece Glosofobia en la actualidad?…”

Decoupling the role of verbal and non-verbal audience behavior on public speaking anxiety in virtual reality using behavioral and psychological measures

“…Essentially, real humans consistently wield social influence, while virtual humans influence hinges on their behavioral authenticity, depending on the realism and the agency of the virtual audience. Research in this direction (El-Yamri et al, 2019) pointed out how it is a complex task to create realistic feedback in the audience for the presentation. It is influenced not only by the words but emotions, as a non-verbal behavior transmitted by the presenter and the audience.…”

Exploring adult learners’ experience with VR-generated feedback for improving online presentation

“…The real-time feedback within the VR presentation system could remind the presenters of the time given to their eye gazing, their voice volume, speech pace and fix these for them at one selected point during the presentation process (e.g., Belboukhaddaoui, & Van Ginkel, 2019). The delayed feedback includes pause timings, measures of voice qualities, the use of gestures (e.g., gestures to emphasise, gestures too much), gaze direction and time (e.g., El-Yamri et al, 2019).…”