Effects of audience familiarity on anxiety in a virtual reality public speaking training tool

Public speaking is an essential skill in everyone's professional or academic career. Nevertheless, practicing it is often not very easy; people do not always have access to a suitable environment and find others willing to listen during their rehearsals. Previous research has shown the usefulness of having a virtual audience in reducing the fear of public speaking. However, the effects of having an audience with whom the presenter is familiar are still under-explored. To help university students practice their presentations, we developed a virtual reality environment and used 3D scans of real people to create a realistic and familiar audience. We conducted a study with 10 participants to analyze whether they had different anxiety levels when presenting to familiar virtual faces compared to unfamiliar faces. Moreover, we explored whether or not the exposure to the customized virtual faces affected anxiety when the participants subsequently presented to a real-life audience. We found that people with a medium fear of speaking in public benefited the most because they felt more relaxed facing a virtual audience with familiar faces; in contrast, there were no noticeable effects for others. In addition, we examined whether anxiety could be detected through some non-traditional metrics we recorded. Results showed that we could not establish a linear correlation between the anxiety scores and our metrics, but our study suggests some underlying patterns. Finally, our findings indicate that users' perceptions of virtual audience feedback were more concerned with the facial expressions of the virtual audience than their body language.