Acceptance and effectiveness of a virtual reality public speaking training

Virtual Reality (VR) has been gaining importance due to its numerous advantages as an immersive technology for learning applications. Next to being used in fields like manufacturing, transportation, communication, retail and real estate, it has also increased in significance for human resources development. Virtual human training programs offer exposure to difficult situations without supervision in a safe and controlled environment, as they simulate nuanced interpersonal situations and therefore allow users to gain new skills and apply them to real-life situations. Furthermore, VR training engages employees in a training session by being presented with a realistic situation designed to challenge and engage them. Practising in a controlled virtual environment also allows for easy and objective measurements of user development and the identification of strengths and weaknesses. In this paper, we evaluate if there is acceptance for practising a presentation in a VR-Speech Training (VR-ST) session using six Degrees of Freedom (6DoF) and if the 44 participants of this study improved, from a subjective point of view, valuable soft skills needed to give a convincing presentation in real life. We observed a positive tendency in the acceptance and effectiveness of the VR-ST.