Designing User-Centered Simulations of Leadership Situations for Cave Automatic Virtual Environments: Development and Usability Study

TL;DR

This project deals with how immersive media could create experiential learning based on simulations for leadership development by developing a user-centered simulation of leadership situations for cave automatic virtual environments and includes the results of a first usability study.

Abstract

Given that experience is a pivotal dimension of learning processes in the field of leadership, the ongoing and unresolved issue is how such experiential moments could be provided when developing leadership skills and competencies. Role-plays and business simulations are widely used in this context as they are said to teach relevant social leadership skills, like those required by everyday communication to followers, by decision-making on compensation, evaluating performance, dealing with conflicts, or terminating contracts. However, the effectiveness of simulations can highly vary depending on the counterpart's ability to act in the given scenarios. In our project, we deal with how immersive media could create experiential learning based on simulations for leadership development. In recent years different variations of extended reality got significant technological improvements. Head-mounted displays are an easy and cost-efficient way to present high-resolution virtual environments. For groups of people that are part of an immersive experience, cave automatic virtual environments offer an excellent trade-off between actual exchange with other humans and interaction with virtual content simultaneously. The work presented is based on developing a user-centered simulation of leadership situations for cave automatic virtual environments and includes the results of a first usability study. In the future, the presented results can help to support the development and evaluation of simulated situations for cave automatic virtual environments with an emphasis on leadership-related scenarios.

Figures (2)

• Figure 1: On the left: what the user sees in the virtual environment; on the right: a picture taken from outside the CAVE
• Figure 2: On the left: Average values over all participants for the two UEQ-S scales pragmatic and hedonic quality. On the right: Average values over all participants for the two IPQ scales general presence (IPQ G1) and spatial presence (IPQ SP).