Emotions-Responsive Audiences for VR Public Speaking Simulators Based on the Speakers' Voice
Loading...
Official URL
Full text at PDC
Publication date
2019
Advisors (or tutors)
Editors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Citation
Abstract
Oratory or the art of public speaking with eloquence has been cultivated since ancient times. However, the fear of speaking in public -a disproportionate reaction to the threatening
situation of facing an audience- affects a very important part of the population. This work arises from the need to help alleviate this fear through a tool where to train the ability of public
speaking. To this purpose, we built a virtual reality system that offers the speaker a safe environment to practice presentations. Since the audience is the only way to receive feedback when giving a speech, our system offers a virtual audience that reacts and gives real-time feedback based on the emotions conveyed by three parameters: voice tone, speech content and speaker’s gaze. In this paper, we detail the modelling of the audience just focusing on the speakers’ voice tone: 1) by presenting an algorithm that controls the audience reactions based on the emotions beamed by the speaker, and 2) by carrying out an experiment comparing the reactions generated by the agents with those of a real audience to the same speech, in order to refine the given algorithm.