Exploring Eye Contact in Virtual Environments: The Compositor Mirror Tool, Areas of Interest, and Public Speaking Competency

ABSTRACT

Eye contact is considered a quintessential aspect of a speaker’s delivery when interacting with an audience. This exploratory study investigated a specific area of interest (AOI) exhibited by speakers in a technologically mediated virtual environment (VE). Such virtual immersion allows speakers to present to audience members and utilize their speaker notes all within a digital replication of the physical speaking environment. A Compositor Mirror Tool (CMT) enables others a first-person point-of-view through the speaker’s head mounted display. Participants (N = 12) were college students enrolled in an introductory public speaking course who completed informative and persuasive speech practices and a post-immersion survey. Seventeen presentations produced nearly 120-minutes of data. The CMT revealed insights into speakers’ AOI and managed their time between audience and speaker notes. Examination of AOI orientations revealed varying proportions for speakers with an average ratio of 60:40 (audience to speaker notes). Note design may contribute to dependence on downward AOI. Correlational analyses observed insights into speakers’ experience in the VE that relate to retrospective speech understanding. VEs coupled with CMT demonstrates promise for impacting psychomotor skills for when speakers communicate within technologically mediated environments for competent skills transfer to reality.

KEYWORDS:

• Virtual environment
• Composite Mirror Tool
• areas of interest
• speaker notes
• public speaking
• eye contact

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Luke LeFebvre

Luke LeFebvre (PhD, Wayne State University) is an assistant professor in the School of Information Science at the University of Kentucky. His research explores instructional communication and communication technology for learning in various educational contexts. Recent articles appear in Communication Education, Communication Quarterly, Communication Studies, Communication Teacher, Imagination, Cognition and Personality, Review of Communication, and the Southern Communication Journal.

Leah E. LeFebvre

Leah E. LeFebvre (PhD, University of Texas) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Alabama. Her primary research focuses on communicative intersections on romantic relationships and emerging technology. Specifically, she explores the proliferation of online, recordable technologies that influence past, current, and future communication, relationship processes, and memory. Recent articles appear in Communication Monographs, Journal of Loss and Trauma, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, Mobile Media & Communication, Personal Relationships, and Social Media + Society.

Mike Allen

Mike Allen (PhD, Michigan State University, 1987) is professor and chair in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has served as editor of Communication Monographs and Communication Studies, published over ten books, 100 journal articles, and 100 book chapters in the area of social influence approaches in Communication. Recent articles appear in Communication Education, Computers in Human Behavior, American Behavioral Scientist, Journal of Family Communication, and Marriage and Family Review. He is the recipient of the John E. Hunter award for career achievement in meta-analysis given by the “International Communication Association.”