SPEAKinVR: validation of a virtual audience

The main goal of this paper is to validate a virtual reality environment for public speaking training. Following Slater’s terminology (2003), there are two important concepts in VR: “immersion which stands for what the technology delivers from an objective point of view” and presence which is “the human reaction to immersion”, i.e., the participant’s subjective sense of being in the virtual place.
The reactions of the audience can have a significant impact on the speaker’s emotions and performance. At a first level, our hypothesis is that interactivity has a positive impact on the presence feeling. At a higher level, as already shown by Chollet et al. (2015), interactivity in VR is also a major ingredient in the training process. It is therefore essential to know if the users perceive the interactions in the virtual environment as representative of the reality and how each one is interpreted. There are two main dimensions in the context of emotion and affect: arousal and valence. As defined by Chollet and Scherer (2017), “arousal can be understood as an audience member’s level of alertness, and valence corresponds to how positively or negatively the person feels toward the speaker or the presentation”. In their paper, they tried to understand how users perceive virtual audience based on the nonverbal behavior of audience members. Our first question is to investigate which attitudes the characters must display and how people perceive the individual members of the audience in terms of their states of arousal and valence.
A second related question is linked to the level of reality used to represent the public. The characters in virtual environments, i.e. avatars, are most often synthetic images. In some cases, photorealistic representations are used but the level of animation is then generally extremely limited. In this context, our second research question investigates whether the use of fully rigged 3D photogrammetric models, i.e. with a skeleton we can animate, can significantly improve the user’s presence.