Review: Public Speaking for Cardboard

The Good: Effective tool for practicing public speaking. Allows you to load in your own slides The Bad: A little rough around the edges. Overly difficult to load in your own slides. Behavior of small boardroom audience seems unrealistic.

Jerry Seinfeld famously once said, "According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that seem right? That means to the average person, if you have to go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy." Certainly the fear of public speaking is a source of anxiety for a great many people, and just recently one more tool has emerged to deal with this problem. The VR app Public Speaking for Cardboard seems like a great application of the psychological principle of exposure therapy — expose the patient to the feared object or situation without any danger, to gradually reduce their anxiety. This app allows you to get right in front of a virtual audience in a realistic setting for a presentation or speech, without the risk of embarrassment or career suicide that speaking in front of a real audience would bring.

As of now there are two environments available in the app in which you can practice your public speaking. The first is a small company boardroom in Oxford, England with an audience of 11, and the second is a large conference-style auditorium in San Jose, CA with an audience of 300. There are placeholders within the experience indicating that they intend to add an experience in Barcelona, Spain for an audience of 25, and an experience in Zurich, Switzerland for 50 people.

The inclusion of these stubs gives the app an unmistakable beta-test feel, but in some other respects it is pretty polished. Both settings look like realistic examples of where a speech might actually be given. This extends down to small details such as the furnishings of the corporate boardroom and the wardrobe of the audience, which all seem authentic. The app also includes an interactive slide show next to you as you give your presentation, a critical feature for many people practicing an actual presentation, as opposed to merely getting used to public speaking. You can even load in your own presentation slides, although only by uploading each slide one by one as an image. There is also a digital timer, allowing you to practice staying within your allotted time. I’ve been to more than my share of speeches where I would have wished the presenter had done this type of practice!

The most important thing missing from this app is a feature for users to upload their presentation as a PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google Slides file. Many people don’t have the patience or the technical ability to convert their presentations into a set of image files. There is at least a tutorial available to walk people through the process of uploading their slides.

One other flaw that I noticed was the behavior of the virtual audience in the small boardroom setting. I was glad to see in the app that some audience members challenge your focus by acting a little distracted — checking their phones, talking, falling asleep, or looking around the room. Certainly any presenter has to be able to deal with these types of behaviors when they crop up in real life. The small boardroom experience however takes this to an absurd extreme. Just about every audience member in the small boardroom experience acts distracted, for the entire time that you are there. Leaving aside whether this is realistic — perhaps it is for some audiences — it doesn’t allow you to practice making eye contact with different audience members throughout your speech. I also feel that it does a disservice to those trying to use the app to overcome a fear of public speaking. I would tend to think that having the whole audience raptly paying attention puts more pressure on the speaker than having everyone distracted.

The large conference room audience had a lot of distracted people as well, but this didn’t strike me as being as much of a problem. For one thing it’s probably more realistic that people stuck in a large audience would feel more free to be distracted without embarrassment. People are also further away, so it just isn’t as important what any individual happens to be doing while you give your speech. I also loved the setting, it truly captured the feel of a large auditorium at a tech conference or an all-hands corporate meeting. The large boardroom experience does have one flaw. There is a podium visible on the conference room stage, but just out of your reach! It would be more realistic and useful to see a smaller version of your slides on the laptop right in front of you, so you don’t need to look behind you to see which slide you are currently on.

On the whole though, the app delivers exactly what it promises — a simple but effective way to practice your public speaking in a realistic setting. It’s a very useful niche that is especially suited to a VR app. As for the rough edges, the creators are clearly aware that they have some more work to do, and promise to provide some new settings and also some future enhancements such as recording your voice for playback and tips on public speaking. I actually do plan to use this app to practice my next presentation, and I’d encourage others to do the same!