This VR platform hopes to help America conquer their biggest phobia of public speaking.
Sometimes getting up in front of a room of clients to give a presentation or raise a glass to toast the bride and groom can be an overwhelming task. Now there’s a new interactive education platform for Samsung Gear VR that teaches individuals and corporate employees to become better communicators.
Developed by VR education and training company Cerevrum, Speech Center VR is the latest app to deliver new methods for improving public speaking and communication skills in personal and business scenarios.
Available today for free (with in-app purchases), Speech Center VR helps you overcome public speaking phobias and prepares employees for more effective sales pitches, negotiations, press conferences, job interviews and many more scenarios.
“Virtual reality holds the potential to revolutionize how we share information and how we learn,” said Olga Peshé, COO of Cerevrum. “VR’s ability to immerse a user into a given subject, to command their full concentration, and to bring other users into that same space, helps stimulate comprehension, engagement and retention of information, whether that’s in a classroom setting or the corporate world.”
There are two versions of Speech Center VR – one for individual consumers who wish to improve their speaking and communications skills, and one for corporate clients that wish to use Speech Center VR as a platform for sharing knowledge, teaching employees and improving internal communications.
Following the alpha launch last January, Speech Center VR for individuals now boasts a number of significant upgrades, including the ability to attend lectures and events from top instructors in real time. The first course available to you will be “The Art of Public Speaking”, presented by speaking coach Sean Michael Thomas. Upcoming courses will focus on other aspects of effective communication: networking skills, effective selling and negotiations, and even dating.
The entire Speech Center VR platform is quite robust, giving you a number of options to learn from, including self-guided and interactive lessons that you can upload and practice presentations in over 10 different, detailed and animated environments. You can even create avatars (over 50,000 different variations), to practice with live participants and receive real-time feedback, as well as upload and share content such as Power Point presentations and other documents in PDF, JPEG, and PNG formats.
On top of all the consumer features of Speech Center VR, organizations, businesses and educational institutions can record presentations with voiceover in one accessible database. The enterprise solutions allow employees to access their sessions later, listen to the recordings while watching the slides, comment on them, and even ask questions. Additionally, the employee uploading the recording can flag their presentations as successful, leading to a unique database of success stories upon which other other employees can draw.
“We started with public speaking because it is one of the most important soft skills we can learn, and yet, it often requires us to overcome our fears,” said Natasha Floksy, CEO of Cerevrum. “VR has the unique ability to closely replicate uncomfortable scenarios, so the more students and professionals practice with Speech Center VR, the more comfortable they become with those scenarios.”
Speech Center VR for individuals is available today on Samsung Gear VR for free. Enterprise and institutional licenses, as well as bespoke offerings, are available separately by contacting Cerevrum.
