Evaluating the Effect of Audience in a Virtual Reality Presentation Training Tool

Abstract: Public speaking is an essential skill in everyone's professional or academic career. Nevertheless, honing this skill is often tricky because training in front of a mirror does not give feedback or inspire the same anxiety as present-ing in front of an audience. Further, most people do not always have access to the place where the presentation will happen. In this research, we developed a Virtual Reality (VR) environment to assist in improving people's presentation skills. Our system uses 3D scanned people to create more realistic scenarios. We conducted a study with twelve participants who had no prior experience with VR. We validated our virtual environment by analyzing whether it was preferred to no VR system and accepted regardless of the existence of a virtual audience. Our results show that users overwhelmingly prefer to use the VR system as a tool to help them improve their public speaking skills than training in an empty environment. However, the preference for an audience is mixed.