Honest Mirror: an AI-driven app fostering oral presentation skills

Person with VR glasses with virtual training environment

Public speaking is considered an essential 21st century skill. Developing good presentation and public speaking skills requires time and plenty of opportunities for practice and feedback. This poses a challenge, considering the current shortage of and growing need for teachers. The UNESCO Institute for Statistics estimates that in order to meet global education goals, 69 million new teachers will be need to be educated by 2030. AI technologies can play an important role in reducing the pressure on teachers while guiding individual learners and developing personalized and just-in-time educational programs.

Previous research has demonstrated that practicing and receiving feedback in Virtual Reality supports students’ learning processes as effectively as teacher feedback. To date, VR systems have focused on developing eye contact and appropriate use of voice. A third and crucial aspect to delivering a clear presentation is body language. 

This project focuses on developing a smartphone application that supports students’ development in posture and gestures, independently of time and place. By using AI technology, data about body language is converted into automatically generated feedback messages. The application, called Honest Mirror, will be offered open source. Honest Mirror is being developed in line with key design criteria regarding scalability, mobility, effectiveness and adoption in education. Various national and international stakeholders contribute by testing the application in their curricula. 

More information can be found at the project website and in the publications listed below.

Related publications

  • Adubra, E., Da Silva, I., Dhungana, B., Mohan, N., Saltsman, G., & Van Ginkel, S. (2019).  Exploring the use of Artificial Intelligence to support teachers and teacher development. UNESCO International Task Force on Teachers, 1(19), 1-16. 
  • Van Ginkel, S., Ruiz, D., Mononen, A., Karaman, C, De Keijzer, A., & Sitthiworachart, J. (2020). The impact of computer-mediated immediate feedback on developing oral presentation skills: an exploratory study in virtual reality. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 412-422. doi: 10.1111/jcal.12424 (Impact Factor: 2.126).
  • Van Ginkel, S., Gulikers, J., Biemans, H., Noroozi, O., Roozen, M., Bos, T., Van Tilborg, R., Van Halteren, M., & Mulder, M. (2019). Fostering oral presentation competence through a virtual reality-based task for delivering feedback. Computers & Education, 134, 78-97. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2019.02.006 (Impact Factor: 5.296).