An interactive virtual audience helps shake the pre-podium nerves

If your heart starts beating quickly and nervous energy fills your body when you have to step out in front of a crowd and speak, you’ve likely been told that all you need is more public speaking practice. But standing in front of a mirror reciting a quarterly earnings presentation isn’t the same as facing your boss and a crowded conference room of colleagues, and going over your best man speech while using your spouse as the lone audience member doesn’t compare to delivering it to a room filled with 200 people.

That’s why London-based start-up VirtualSpeech came up with the idea to use virtual reality to tackle public speaking practice. The tool creates a realistic virtual environment in which to practice a speech without fear of embarrassment, giving users an easy way to gain speaking experience that closely mirrors the real-life circumstances of their presentation.

VirtualSpeech offers several sample scenarios, such as an office with 15 people or a podium in which you can imagine speaking to 400 audience members. A wedding scenario is also in the works. Each virtual environment provides 360-degree views, an interactive audience and auditory distractions similar to sounds you may have to tune out when you eventually deliver your speech to your colleagues or acquaintances.

If you plan to use slides to make points during your presentation, you can load those into VirtualSpeech so that they appear in virtual reality, as well, helping you get a better sense of how well the speech complements the visual components of your presentation.

Photo-realistic virtual audience members and conferences rooms are meant to help give the impression that you are actually at the event when you practice your speech, and a clock in each room helps you keep tabs on the time and make sure segments of your speech does not run too short or too long.

The app is compatible with Android devices, as well as with Google Cardboard.

VirtualSpeech

Audience via Shutterstock