Exploring interactions, immersion, and presence in a Virtual Reality experience for mooting

Speaking out in public is one of the most important skills a person should develop. It is especially true regarding business, law, and education. To efficiently teach students practical skills in their learning journey, we need to prepare and train them. In this paper, we focus on mooting, also known as a mock trial, which is often used in universities to achieve this goal. Like every training module, it can be logistically challenging to implement. In the past years, Virtual Reality (VR) has shown to be particularly useful when it comes to learning by doing. In VR, participants are immersed in a controlled virtual environment. This paper aims to validate the implementation of a comprehensive, automated, artificial intelligence-based VR application for mooting to improve participant performance. Semi-structured interviews will be conducted at UK, and Belgian universities and an experiment with 125 participants will be conducted within the same institutions to determine the characteristics of such an environment. We will also know if there are significant differences between Belgium and the United Kingdom that must be considered when designing it. Of course, the results will not be limited to mooting and can be easily adapted to other areas where speaking in public is a competency important to learn. For example, in business processes: the sales representative who presents a product to customers, the tourist guide visiting a city with a group, and the manager who defends his project in front of stakeholders... In future work, we will use our environment during the training of the students to confront them in various situations in response to their speech.