“Effective Communication through Virtual Reality and Education Technologies (CommunicArte)”

José Borja Manero Iglesias, Virginia Francisco Gilmartín, Raquel Hervás Ballesteros, Carlos León Aznar, Eva Ullán Hernández, Gonzalo Méndez Pozo, Federico Penado Gil, Mónica Desirée Sánchez Aranegui, Darío Lanza Vidal, Susana Bautista Blasco and Pilar Pérez Camarero, Universidad Complutense de Madrid; Nahum Álvarez Ayerza, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.

The goal of this project is to teach public speaking via the use of videogames in virtual reality environments.

The researchers will base their studies on the premise that employability will be halved by the progress of technology and digitalization. Oral communication is becoming an essential skill that Europeans must acquire in order to improve their chances of finding a job and tackling the major changes being brought about by digitalization.

With the CommunicArte project, the researchers wish to teach public speaking via videogames in virtual reality environments. To achieve this, a cross-disciplinary team has been set up with experience in various areas: educational videogames, computational narratology, affective computation, art, psychology and virtual reality. This team will create a new learning method based on an Immersive Gamified Learning Environment (IGLE), which will teach the player how to face an audience.

The videogame will gather information about the player, such as biometrics, voice analysis, body movements and speech, and will assess their speaking based on a virtual audience model. This will allow the player to receive advice on how to improve the way they communicate.