Page 45 - AeM_July_2020

TECHNOLOGIES
&
PRODUCTS

VR glasses Oculus Go for lecture and

presentation training

The German seminar provider and specialist publisher and small 1:1 scenarios, too. Furthermore, it is possible
Dashöfer launched the virtual reality (VR) to choose whether the setup should be simple,
application EasySpeech for presentation skills training. medium, or difficult: it is "difficult" when the listeners are
Speakers can import their presentation or practice step restless, cell phones ring, there are interrupters asking
by step rhetorical exercises such as direct speeches. questions, there is an additional noise level, like an
ambulance with a siren pasting by, or light flickering as
The Oculus Go was one of the first VR glasses to work if the power would immediately fails – in other words -
“standalone”, which means without a PC. It connects to incidences that usually make a speaker nervous.
the smartphone via the in-house Wi-Fi and this in turn
establishes the connection to the Oculus servers. The In practice, it is very surprising how quickly it is possible
user can simply put on the glasses and get started. to dive into the scenario. Maybe, at the beginning, you
hesitate a little, you may not know what to tell or it is
VR grows and revolutionizes learning embarrassing when others watch what you are doing
environments under the glasses, but that is forgotten after a minute or
two and you start chattering.
Whoever has ever worn an Oculus Go does not need
an introduction: the glasses are calibrated quickly, AI gives feedback
EasySpeech is started and the user is faced with a
selection of lecture scenarios after selecting one by The Dashöfer development team developed a CRM
clicking the controller, finding himself immediately in a user administration, an analysis tool, and an AI speech
digital conference room with a lot of strangers focused recognition for EasySpeech and linked them via
on him. interfaces. The AI recognizes every word in the lecture
and analyzes, among other things, the number of filler
Jumping straight into a scenario is the right strategy to words (uhm, uh ..), the articulation, repetition of words,
feel the performance spectrum of a VR application. If speaking speed, eye contact and the duration of the
you have completed the first round and are again in lecture. In the first evaluation appears immediately after
front of the selection menu, it becomes much clearer the lecture ended by giving points between 0 and 10
what you really want to train and which parameters you which is spurring the ambition to practice more. There
still want to configure. is no doubt that EasySpeech can train minimal
invasively speaking in front of an audience. If you want
The standard scenarios are actually quite tough: here to overcome your fear of speech, you will find more
are two main use cases: 1) the user wants to give a than enough thrill here.
lecture, check the timing and smooth the verbal
transitions between the slides; 2) the user basically Dashöfer's AI even transcribes the lecture and if it is in
wants to train his speaker skills. For the latter, there are good quality, each lecture will become a nice piece for
very challenging tasks, such as the impromptu speech, content marketing and makes the investment
where the software assigns you a topic and you have to worthwhile. ◊
speak freely about it: in the first version of EasySpeech,
meetings are trained in a conference room with 10 By Daniela La Marca
listeners; there is the expansion to large conferences

45 July 2020: Virtual-, Augmented & Mixed Reality: revolutionizing the customer experience