Virtual Reality on Public Speaking Phobia mitigation

The capacity to speak in public requires personal skills that not everyone has. Anxiety and nervousness, many times easily classified as phobia, can represent serious handicaps and committing the expected speaking performance. Being a subject rather explored by contemporaneous literature, this research wants to contribute to exploring Virtual Reality and Gamification strategies for mitigating those difficulties. During this project a VR application for Google Cardboards was developed, to allow speakers to immersively face simulated 3D scenarios. With the aim of representing real-life scenarios as closely as possible, after each speaking session, the assessment process allows the user to find his limitations and reorient future experiences. Speakers are assessed on four indicators, namely voice tone, audience visual contact, head movements, and speech duration. Scenarios and speeches can be created dynamically by specialists, and classified into different difficulty levels, allowing each participant to define his own learning path. Experimentations were done with two distinct groups of students and the main results outcomes are described and analyzed. This research constitutes part of an ERASMUS+ funding project.