Cerevrum is building an ambitious educational platform starting with training people to become better public speakers with Speech Center VR. The basic mechanic is that you stand in a variety of different virtual rooms in front of an animated crowd of virtual listeners as you give a presentation. The app is designed to help people get over their fears of public speaking, but there are many other educational learning opportunities from a number of upcoming courses featuring public speaking coaches.
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I had a chance to catch up with CEO Natasha Floksy and COO Olga Peshé to talk about designing their two educational applications Speech Center VR and their brain training application Cerevrum.
Natasha has an art degree, and there’s a strong design aesthetic imbued within every dimension of Speech Center VR, from the different rooms to the user interface to the highly customizable avatar system, which is one of the more impressive aspects of the experience. At the moment, you are a disembodied ghost, and so you never fully appreciate your own selected digital identity. But there is a wide array of identity choices, along with many different features and functionality within the app.
You can download Speech Center VR for free, upload a presentation PDF, and record yourself talking to a room full of virtual strangers. There are also interactive social components as well just in case you wanted to hold an intimate meetup there. There are a number of in-app purchases for getting a chance do some practice training within a variety of other different public speaking engagements. There’s actually a surprising amount of functionality included within the experience, including a supplemental eye training application to help to improve your vision.
There’s a number of small improvements that could be made including having a monitor for the presenter, improving the social behaviors of the virtual audience to be a little less uncanny, and having a little bit more intuitive way to advance slides more than swiping down on the side of the Gear VR headset. But overall, Cerevrum has built a robust educational platform with a lot of room to grow into many specific domains.
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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip