I want "Presentation Hero"

by Erica Driver.

I *love* Guitar Hero III and Rock Band. These video games feed the disease of my big bad rock star alter ego. For an hour or two, I can believe I no longer sing out of key. The progression of age and expansion of waistline temporarily halt. I spent an embarrassingly huge portion of my winter vacation with friends in front of the Xbox with a plastic guitar in my hands. It was a blast.

Now, here’s what I’m thinking. A big part of my job is doing speeches, teleconferences, and Webinars. Some are formal, on a stage in front of a thousand people. For others, I’m sitting in my office with a headset on, pressing the “next” button on the Web conferencing tool, desparately hoping I’m keeping my invisible audience on the phone engaged. And sometimes I’m in Second Life, trying to deal with my avatar, voice connectivity, text chat, and flipping through slides – all at the same time. In all cases, I rehearse my speeches before I deliver them, especially if I am presenting material for the first time.

• My current practice mode is, well, Jurassic. Call me a dinosaur, but the way I rehearse presentations today is I print the slides out in 3-inch squares and re-arrange them on the carpet in my office until I think the flow is right. Then I put words in the notes section and print the slides out, and I go over them in my head and then out loud until I’m comfortable. (Hey, it beats my early days, when I drew smiley faces on 8×11 sheets of paper and stuck them on the wall so I could rehearse looking at people in my audience for 5 seconds at a time!) Ahead of time, I often have no idea how my stage will be set up or how many people will be in the audience. I rehearse speeches as though each was going to be the same as the last. And I’m rehearsing alone, all by myself.
• What I want: Presentation Hero! I want to rehearse my presentations in a virtual environment that is just as fun and immersive as Guitar Hero III and Rock Band. I want to be able to select a virtual space to rehearse in that approximates the space (physical or virtual) where I’ll be doing my actual presentation. It could be an executive boardroom at the headquarters of a Fortune 500 company, a ballroom at the Javits Center in New York, or a moon base conference center in Second Life. I want a virtual rehearsal space that feels about as big as where I’ll be doing my actual presentation, with about the right number of artificial intelligence avatars in the audience and the right size stage. I want to select whether my artificial audience is wearing suits or T-shirts. I want to clip a virtual lavalier mike onto my virtual shirt and hear my voice as though it’s coming through the sound system. I want to get the jitters. I want to plan out my movement around the stage. I want to be able to record my rehearsal and play it back – both the audio and visual. I want a little 3D tag cloud to show me how many “ums” and “ahs” I had, and in what sections of the speech. 

An early indicator of things to come: IBM Research has created what it calls a “rehearsal studio” in a 3D virtual environment. IBM employees can use the environment to rehearse sales pitches and other business activities. It’s not a stretch to picture this kind of capability available on the market on an on-demand basis, inexpensive to rent. I give it 2 years, and I can’t wait.

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