Abstract:

Oratory or the art of public speaking with eloquence has been cultivated since ancient times. Nowadays, the Internet has multiplied the importance of this discipline, because today audiences can be counted in millions of people. However, the fear of speaking in public -a disproportionate reaction to the threatening situation of facing an audience- affects to a very important part of the population.

For example, 57% of young people (12-17 years old) consider the fear of speaking in public as the second most feared social situation, and 75% of the population is affected by this fear.

To alleviate this fear, we created the Project ComunicArte, a virtual reality videogame for training the ability of public speaking. It is built as an environment where the speaker confronts a virtual audience that reacts in real time to the speaker’s features, such as voice, gestures and bio-metric parameters (heart rate or body language, among others). This videogame is is focused on the audience, since in real life, the only feedback we receive when we speak in public is provided by our listeners. The novelty of this tool are the emotions extracted from the orator features, which influence directly in the audience reactions. Thus, the videogame includes a realistic audience that reacts in real time to the way the speakers gives the speech, to give them the possibility to react and adapt their speech accordingly.

This paper details the design and creation of this game, its general characteristics and the modeling of its reactive virtual audience.

Keywords:

Public speaking, virtual reality, educational videogames, emotion analysis.