Metaverse Mastery: Enhancing Public Speaking Skills in Linguistic High School Students Through Advanced Technologies

Developing cross-cutting skills for graduating students is a key objective outlined in the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), aimed at addressing school dropout rates and encouraging further academic pursuits. This research explores solutions grounded in interactive systems to engage students more effectively and facilitate the development of these skills. Specifically, our focus is on public speaking, and we investigate how metaverse and virtual reality platforms can impact anxiety levels, enhance the sense of empowerment in public speaking, and influence the level of engagement and acceptance of this technology as training tools. To achieve this, we organized and conducted a pilot study involving one workshops in a linguistic high school, engaging a cohort of 19 students. During this workshop, students prepared a 5-minute speech to be delivered in a virtual forum using 3D avatars. We employed a metaverse solution developed by Università degli Studi Internazionali di Roma - UNINT, named UNINTVERSE, featuring diverse environments. Students were instructed to enter a waiting room and then proceed to the speaking venue, mimicking real-world actions to provide them with a heightened sense of realism and immersion. Preliminary results indicate that the metaverse and virtual reality can be complementary tools to enhance cross-cutting skills, such as public speaking, rather than substitutes for traditional methods. They can be used to alleviate the anxiety and fear typically experienced by young and untrained individuals. This study highlights two main properties of these technologies: creating a layer between the speaker and the public and experiencing different scenarios that may be difficult or impossible to reproduce in the real world.