Many people have had a similar experience – standing on the podium, facing the audience offstage, shivering, throat dry and tight, brain blank, and then began to stutter and incoherent speech; A racing heart, stomach upset, or feeling nauseous and dizzy a few hours before the stage are typical symptoms of speaking anxiety. Can speech anxiety be overcome? How to get out of the shadow of speech anxiety?
What is speech anxiety? Public-speaking anxiety is a situation-specific non-generalized anxiety disorder. Individuals with speech anxiety will experience a series of physical and mental discomfort when facing public speaking, and even have corresponding behavioral manifestations. Public speaking anxiety is a type of social anxiety that is a state anxiety.
Practise makes perfect, it is the best to practise virtually before you go to speak in front of a big group of real people. If you only practise in an empty classroom, it will not help, as you have no eye contact from the audience, you can not gain any good experience, and as soon as you are back to give a speech to a real audience, you feel totally the different way. That is why VR speech is necessary. VR applications have unique advantages in practicing speeches. In an immersive VR environment, users can concentrate more on simulating the actual speech process, prepare mentally before going on stage, and avoid stage fright. You can freely choose a place to practice speech, which can be a classroom or a lecture hall. Users can choose according to their own needs. as it is highly configurable, with options for conference rooms with a small number of people in the background and conference rooms with a large audience (audience size can be selected from 1 to 2000), and also You can choose from various scenes (such as simulating the background of real corporate conference rooms, university classrooms). It also supports multi-scene switching. In the high-rise building scene, users can transfer between multiple locations, such as: board room (10 people), small meeting room (5 people), office (2 people), manager’s office (1 person) , CEO office (2 people). In addition, these scenes can also be customized in sequence. For example, you can choose to add a whiteboard to the board meeting of a high-rise building, let 80% of the audience wear formal clothes, and set whether to use a laptop computer and a TV screen in a small meeting room in a high-rise building The audience is dressed in casual clothes, etc.
After a period of regular practising, anyone with little public speaking experience can get familiar with what the scene is and what it would like to speak to the real people, and become less stressed, and combined with some other speech tricks, they can be more confident to overcome the uncertainty and the inexperience.
At present, there are many VR speech simulation applications on the APP store, such as “Virtual Orator”, “Speech Center VR”, “BeFearless”, “Public Speaking VR”, “Public Speaking Simulator VR”, etc. 