AudienceAR-Utilising Augmented Reality and Emotion Tracking to Address Fear of Speech

With Augmented Reality (AR) we can enhance the reality by computer-generated information about real entities projected in the user’s field of view. Hence, the user’s perception of a real environment is altered by adding (or subtracting) information by means of digital augmentations. In this demo paper we present an application where we utilise AR technology to show visual information about the audience’s mood in a scenario where the user is giving a presentation. In everyday life we have to talk to and in front of people as a fundamental aspect of human communication. However, this situation poses a major challenge for many people and may even go so far as to lead to fear and and avoidance behaviour. Based on findings in previous work about fear of speech, a major cause of anxiety is that we do not know how the audience judges us. To eliminate this feeling of uncertainty, we created an AR solution to support the speaker while giving a speech by tracking the audience’s current mood and displaying this information in real time to the speaker’s view: AudienceAR. By doing so we hypothesise to reduce the speaker’s tension before and during presentation. Furthermore, we implemented a small web interface to analyse the presentation based on the audience mood after the speech is given. Effects will be tested in future work.