Abstract
Social skills training courses for managers and sales representatives are mainly realized today through role-playing sessions, which show several limits: realism, contextualization, evaluation objectivity. This paper describes a prototype of a Virtual Reality tool intended to answer these issues. This tool allows living role-playing sessions with virtual characters. We present the results of the first user tests we carried out. Users felt spatially present, involved, and socially present. Results also underline areas of improvement, such as non-verbal behaviors, scenario content and environment realism.