The goal of our project is to offer a form of exposure therapy to users who have Glossophobia.
We have used various VR tools within Unity to help our users grow their confidence when speaking on stage and slowly help them overcome their fears.
The participant is exposed to an auditorium where they have control over different parameters of the environment, such as the audience size, script difficulty, audience reactions, and timers. They also have access to exercises to help calm their nerves.
The user can control the following settings:
- Increase or decrease audience size from empty, low occupancy, medium occupancy, to full.
- Turn the timer on or off.
- Turn the audience reactions on or off.
- Change the difficulty level of the practice script.
Once the user reaches the end of the script, they are prompted to evaluate how they performed this practice round from a scale of 1-5. This way they are able to track their progress as they continue practicing.
With this table, the user can see the details of every practice round they have done, including all of the customizations implemented for each round. This will help with isolating which triggers have the most impact on their performance.
Finally, we've implemented an aspect of EMDR therapy to help the user with any anxiety they may have around public speaking. This form of therapy involves rhythmic right-left haptic feedback as the user focuses their thoughts on things that could help them reduce anxiety in relation to certain situations. The haptic feedback was done using the Oculus controllers, which can't be seen very clearly in the video but if you look closely you might see the hands vibrating slightly. We began this exercise with a few rounds of deep breathing to help the user clear their head to focus on the situation at hand.
- Zhiling Hu, zh347@cornell.edu, dareg0
- Meera Nanda, mn584@cornell.edu, meerananda
- Prithvi Sriram, ps976@cornell.edu, PrithviSriram