Public speaking in virtual reality: Audience design and speaker experiences

Whether we are talking about our research at a conference, making a speech at a friend’s wedding, or presenting a proposal in a businessmeeting,we have to speak in public from time to time. How well we deliver a presentation affects the way people think about us and our message. To deliver a well-received speech, preparation is necessary. Among various speech preparation activities, practicing with an audience is regarded as an effective way for enhancing speech performance. However, it is often impractical to organize an audience to practice a presentation and to arrange the diverse set of audience behaviours that are tailored to trainee’s individual skills and learning goals. Virtual reality can provide a solution by practicing with a virtual audience. Although virtual audiences have been used in many domains, e.g., evoking social stress, therapy for social phobia, and improving teaching performance, little research has been reported on the impact of virtual audiences on public speakers’ belief and performance. Therefore, this thesis aims to create a virtual audience which generates flexible expressive behaviours for a public speaking scenario and examines how public speaking experiences in front of such an audience affect the speakers’ belief and speech performance.