Flexibility in Virtual Environments – A Fully Adjustable Virtual Classroom

Abstract

The fear of public speaking is one of the most wide-spread social problems of the world today. It is present in early childhood as well as in adultness, and causes problems with further influence on the child’s entire life. The hesitation or the inability to speak in a heart-quaked situation can easily lead to bullying from classmates or even the teacher can misinterpret it as lack of knowledge or unwillingness to give the answer at all. For helping such children overcome their fear we developed a virtual environment imitating a classroom with its usual elements. The user immerses the virtual environment via a head mounted display where he or she must solve tasks in a “living” classroom of noisy, commentating classmates and a virtual teacher. A teacher or therapist supervises the acting in the virtual class and reacts to the doings of the user through speaking to him directly or allocating a speech utterance or other act to one of the virtual classmates. Due to its complex nature and complete adaptability the virtual classroom proved to be a very useful tool in helping such children and it is already in use in a primary school.