Catherine Hu ¹ and Andrew Park ² , ¹ Tarbut V’ Torah, USA, ² University of California, USA

Public speaking is considered one of the most important skills required for academic, social, and professional success. Typical traditional ways of preparing, such as practicing by yourself or speaking in front of a small group of classmates or friends may not entirely recreate real presentation settings accurately and properly. This paper presents Virtual Stage VR, an immersive virtual reality system created to support people in practicing and improving public speaking skills and abilities in realistically recreated environments. The system includes three main components: a web application, StageNotes, used for creating, editing, and organizing note cards during the presentation, server communication for saving as well as transferring users data, and the main VR application on Unity, that recreates real presentation conditions such as, classrooms, meeting rooms, and lecture halls or auditoriums in school. Although, along the way, several challenges were encountered during the process of development, including if note cards were included in the simulation, how users would be able to edit and organize them, limited environment choices, and communication between the web application and VR system. These challenges were resolved by designing improved and more VR environment options, and including a web application based note card editor and organizer, StageNotes, which by using server communication could transfer and store users’ information between StageNotes and the VR simulation. Experiments evaluated whether the simulation increased speaking confidence and whether the note cards system included would help users remember main points during their presentation. Conclusions demonstrated that participants that underwent the experiment encountered increased confidence following rehearsing in the VR setting, as well as improved memory and being able to remember additional key presentation points while utilizing the note card system. These outcomes imply that Virtual Stage VR can serve as an effective, convenient, and accessible tool for strengthening public speaking abilities. Because the program provides users with such a good system to practice and rehearse presentations in realistic circumstances at any time, it gives a beneficial solution for students and professionals who desire to improve their confidence and speaking levels before actually going out, and presenting in public and real-world scenarios.

VR, Public Speaking, Immersive Simulations, Confidence Building, Realistic