This is one of the more interesting non-gaming use cases for virtual reality I've seen in awhile -- a public speaking trainer:
Inside the headset, Ovation offers up a highly configurable experience for practicing your public speaking. Scenes range from a handful of people in a boardroom to a large group of people in a conference hall. As most any public speaking engagement is supported by some sort of prepared material, you can import a range of ‘Speech Items’ which can be pure text, for placing on virtual notecards or teleprompters; powerpoint slides and PDFs, for showing on projectors and screens; and imported images, to place drawings for on whiteboards.
More on Road to VR here. As with many one-off VR applications for real world use, the need for an open-ended multi-user creation and deployment platform is really screaming out:
Rather than practice public speaking in front of a group of automated NPCs, imagine if this was deployed on, say, High Fidelity, Sansar, or Sinespace, and the audience was actual users who were actually making eye contact with you? (And the audience was there because the speaker paid each of them $1 in virtual currency to attend and make that eye contact.) I imagine this would be a far more useful training program. Having done much public speaking inside virtual worlds, I can personally confirm that it's maybe 25%-50% as stressful and nerve wracking as speaking in real life -- i.e. great training wheels, especially for people starting out.
Via /Virtualreality, which has an interesting comment thread, including this good point:
Considering that public speaking is more feared than death by some people this kind of anti-phobia app ranks right up there...
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