Virtual worlds: Professors, students explore extended reality for research and learning.

CEO in a boardroom

In Tim Hubbard’s strategic management course in the Mendoza College of Business, one immersive exercise places students in the position of a CEO whose company faces a public relations crisis: a top executive at the firm has been accused of sexual harassment. Standing in a virtual boardroom, in real time, the student must address seven members of the firm’s board of directors — who appear as animated figures — and is ordered to explain how the crisis will be handled. Cut to a virtual TV studio, where a journalist interrogates the student on live television about the sexual harassment problem within the firm.

“They won’t be CEOs for 20 years, but the only way to actually learn to think like a CEO is to have an idea of what the job feels like,” says Hubbard, the assistant professor of management and organization who created this VR scenario. As a co-director of the campus VR lab in Corbett Hall and the University’s first-ever XR faculty fellow, Hubbard uses VR tools for research on behavior by business leaders, the impact of boardroom diversity initiatives and related issues. He says countless other experiences may be created to help students and business executives.

For example, VR may place a student inside a scene that mimics testifying before a congressional committee. It would be expensive and unwieldy to recreate a life-size congressional hearing room for the purpose, but a VR headset can generate the scene and populate it with members of Congress who interact with each other and address questions to the would-be executive sitting in the virtual witness chair, Hubbard says.

Read the full story at ND Magazine.