VR device to reduce fear of public speaking

A Cambridge scientist has received widespread praise for creating a virtual reality tool that helps people overcome their fear of public speaking. He’s called Chris Macdonald, and I went to meet him at Lucy Cavendish College to take the device for a test drive…

Chris Smith - So I'm wearing a virtual reality headset and this is in 3D and at the moment I'm looking at a wall and a lectern and I gather if I turn around my audience are waiting for me to talk to them. So I'm going to swing around. I have now got a lecture theatre full of people and they're all looking at me. Some of them aren't looking at me because they're actually asleep. One person is talking to the person next to them. One person looks so bored. Yeah, I can understand why this would be intimidating because I'm literally two or three feet away from the people in the front row. I have to take this off because I can't talk to the person who created it as well as look at it. But I have to say Chris, I mean are those real people that I was seeing in there or was that computer generated?

Chris Macdonald - So I've used two technologies to create the virtual reality training environments. One set of audiences is created using effectively spherical video stitching which is where I do live capture of an audience. I do a little bit of tweaking afterwards but that's how we create the most high fidelity photorealistic audiences. But I also do use 100% CGI and through that we're able to create much larger audiences like stadiums of tens of thousands of people, camera flashes, panning stadium lights etc. It's all built to try to create a very fear-inducing scenario to empower people to train in front of them.

Chris Smith - What was the reason you did this in the first place?

Chris Macdonald - Well the fear of public speaking is very prevalent. It's widely cited as being the most common fear. It affects up to 80% of UK university students. It's harmful for physical health, mental health, academic attainment, career progression. What got me started on this project is really trying to help my nephew. He was at college at the time. He had a presentation coming up. He was really not looking forward to it. And it started off with me just trying to really help him as much as I could. So I was looking at the literature, seeing what's the most effective tools. It was during COVID so I couldn't meet up with him in person. That led me to explore online remotely accessible tools. I looked into creating virtual reality training environments. Even the early versions I built for him were really not photorealistic. They were like pixelated Lego men but even that was effective. And that's what got me started with this. I saw that a very crude approximate simulacrum of an audience was able to reduce his levels of anxiety.

Chris Smith - What's the general way this works then to your mind? You've got a PhD in behavioural science. So talk us through what you think is going on. When I put a headset on, it's effectively a set of ski goggles with a mobile phone in it, isn't it? And that's creating a very, very realistic experience. I honestly could believe if I'd just woken up that I was standing in front of that crowded lecture theatre full of people. But what is the principle here?

Chris Macdonald - So it's known as exposure therapy. That was developed by Joseph Walt. We've been using it for decades. You could think of it like creating levels in a video game, say for arachnophobia. Say someone has a fear of spiders. We know that exposure is helpful but holding a tarantula on day one, that might be too much. But they might be able to hold a photo or a picture of a spider. And then next week, a toy spider and then a small spider for five seconds. So it's ultimately about creating a gradation that increases over time. And that can lead to desensitisation. Ultimately, that can lead to fear extinction. There are different mechanisms people apply. Sometimes people couple this with relaxation exercises. We know that we can't be incredibly fearful, anxious, terrified and calm at the same time. They're incompatible states. So what Joseph Walt started to do is he would get people to be in front of their fear whilst practising relaxation exercises. And if you do that over time, that can accelerate this decoupling of the feared stimuli and the emotional response.

Chris Smith - What you're doing really resonates with me because when I first started trying to make radio programmes, it was about a quarter of a century ago now, I can't believe I'm saying that, but I used to panic like mad for the whole day before I had a radio programme in the evening that I would have to present. But then after about six months, something suddenly flipped and I never get nervous doing any of this kind of thing ever again. So it's sort of I had the real life experience habituation to it that you're creating with this. But does it really work? I mean, if you take a person who normally would be totally rendered helpless with anxiety, but the prospect of giving a seminar or something, would they, after exposure to this, say it did make me anxious to start with, but then it made me less anxious the more I did it?

Chris Macdonald - Yeah, we're taking a very data-driven approach. We ultimately want to create the most effective tool. So we're constantly trialling it. The first round of trials we did was with a Chinese summer school. And we got students to practise a presentation, they practise in virtual reality, and then they practise delivering in real life. And we found that it was efficacious, it was proven to be statistically significant. It effectively doubled the number of people in the classroom that would define themselves as a confident public speaker. Since then, we've done trials in UCL and the University of Cambridge, and we found that it's beneficial to 100% of participants so far. We're seeing that it's increasing confidence, or it's decreasing anxiety, or it's increasing people's sense of resilience. Sometimes they still feel anxious, but they know that they have the skills to deal with that. And we're continuing to expand the sample sizes, we're doing more studies, we're rolling it out in schools. The idea is to have an iterative process where we're constantly getting engagement from users to make it more and more effective.

Chris Smith - And is that the next step then? That this is basically something that if a person knows they've got to give a workplace seminar, or they've got to stand up and talk at a wedding, they could go on to something like this and practice, and no one needs to know, and they slowly burn out their fears.

Chris Macdonald - Yeah, I somewhat view it like I set out with a simple goal, insofar as it's quite concise, create the most effective treatment for the most common fear and make it freely available. With the launch of this platform, I feel like I've done that. But now in a way is the tricky part. And that's rolling it out, getting it embedded into universities, making sure people are using it, making sure that person who's giving a best man speech in a week's time knows that this is a viable option. And also to know that it's not only is the platform free, you have the technology already to access it. Because it's all well and good me creating a free platform, but it wouldn't really be free if you then had to purchase a very expensive VR headset to use it. So you can access it with a headset if you have one, but you can also access it just how you viewed it today, with a smartphone inside of a device mount.