Public Speaking in Virtual Reality: Facing an Audience of Avatars

hat happens when someone talks in public to an audience they know to be entirely computer gen-erated—to an audience of avatars? If the virtual audience seems attentive, well-behaved, and interested, if they show positive facial expressions with complimen-tary actions such as clapping and nodding, does the speaker infer correspondingly positive evaluations of performance and show fewer signs of anxiety? On the other hand, if the audience seems hostile, disinterested , and visibly bored, if they have negative facial expressions and exhibit reactions such as head-shaking , loud yawning, turning away, falling asleep, and walking out, does the speaker infer correspondingly negative evaluations of performance and show more signs of anxiety? We set out to study this question during the summer of 1998. We designed a virtual public speaking scenario, followed by an experimental study. In this work we wanted mainly to explore the effectiveness of virtual environments (VEs) in psychotherapy for social phobias. Rather than plunge straight in and design a virtual reality therapy tool, we first tackled the question of whether real people's emotional responses are appropriate to the behavior of the virtual people with whom they may interact. We concentrated on public speaking anxiety as an ideal arena for two reasons. First, it's relatively simple technically compared to more general social interactions. A public speaking scenario involves specific stylized behaviors on the part of the avatars, making it relatively straightforward to implement. Second, this application has high usefulness within the broader context of social phobias, public speaking being a prevalent cause of anxiety among the general population. Previous research into using VEs in a mental health setting have concentrated on specific phobias such as fear of heights, flying, spiders, and open spaces. 1 A recent study suggested that VR might prove useful in treating public speaking anxiety. 2 This study provided evidence that virtual therapy effectively reduced self-reported levels of anxiety. Our research intends to address the prior step: Before developing an effective tool, we should elicit the factors in a VE that will provoke the desired response in clients. If people do not report and exhibit signs and symptoms similar to those generated during a real public talk, then VE-based therapy cannot succeed. Moreover, the answer to this more fundamental question can have applications in a wider context than therapy—for example, in our starting point for this research, which took place in the context of collaboration in …