Business School faculty here. We have some budget to buy electronics. We're thinking of buying a Virtual Reality "thing" and using it somehow.
We can use it for pedagogy, or as a marketing tool, etc. (E.g., it could contain a demonstration of the advantages of a business degree, and we could leave it in our waiting room or take it with us to student recruitment events).
We can't figure out what to buy and how to use it.
Suggestions?
Using VR in the classroom is pretty difficult if not all students can benefit from the VR system simultaneously. If only one student could use it at a time, you'd have to schedule time for students to use it outside of class.
Perhaps your best bet is to create a brainstorming contest for your students and incentivize it with prizes. As business students, they'll benefit from coming up with ideas for a "client" and competing for funding.
You could just purchase the system and encourage students to create VR applications for it. Encourage them to network with people in other fields to see what their needs are and how those fields might be able to benefit from VR. Perhaps they could do some market research? If you're feeling ambitious, and your students are up to the challenge, have your students work with computer science students to make a new product. This may work better as an honor's project or a class project for an upper-level or specialized course.
You could also use existing VR software to show the students what is being done with VR in other fields in order to inspire creativity and innovation. Show them how it's being used in medicine (a tool for robotic surgery), engineering (design visualization/analysis), real estate and tourism (virtual tours), the military (drone control, virtual warfare, etc.) and so on. You could show them Google Expeditions.
If possible, try to build a course around it. Virtual reality is expected to become much bigger (citation needed), so there are tons of business opportunities. Use your VR system to give your students an advantage.
The primary strengths of most commercial VR systems today are:
If you can leverage both of these things in the context of business, you're good to go.
Using it as a flashy public-relations stunt is a great idea, but try to effectively use the VR system in an interactive way. One possibility is using existing VR software to show the students what is being done with VR, and inspire innovation. Show them how it's being used in medicine (a tool for robotic surgery), engineering (design visualization/analysis), real estate and tourism (virtual tours), and so on.
I designed a VR system for an intro CS class once and came up with some demonstrations/applications for related fields. I'll try to do the same for a business school:
The important thing to remember about virtual and augmented reality devices is that they are tools; they are new, super cool and exciting tools, but they are just tools none-the-less. I would suggest you consider them in the same way that you would an iPad, or a new Mac Pro tower, or a Smart Board.
As of now, virtual and augmented reality devices have only very recently moved from limited, technical prototypes into increasingly practical (and affordable) commercial products. The upside to this is that if you are doing research in a multi/inter-disciplinary way, everything is new, minimally explored, and underdeveloped. The downside to this is that everything is new, minimally explored, and underdeveloped.
I can tell you from personal experience that if you get your hands on one, you'll find it's just so cool and fun to play with the tech demos and explore what applications are out there (unless you are, well, dead inside - or if you get VR sickness easily, or if you just don't have much of a nerd-core to you). But you'll quickly find the selection is limited, and there are few pre-packaged solutions for absolutely anything substantive you may want to do.
That's where the work starts. The practical reality is that you'll need a lot of technical skills to do anything custom on your own. You'll need to choose from a relatively limited set of programming languages and tools, depending on the device and platform, and if you haven't worked in graphics before you'll have all kind of fun things to learn about like quaternions, physics engines, multiple coordinate systems and spaces (camera vs screen, etc), and more. The software is rapidly evolving, so the large amount of tutorials available ends up being deceiving - most will be significantly out of date (some less than 1-2 years old will be totally broken), so 20+ hours a week for an experienced computer programmer over a summer might get you your own space shooter clone game (if you don't go off script too much).
So, what if you don't have such existing expertise in your department?
The most approachable use for such equipment is for independent study projects, especially with people interested in technological/computer entrepreneurship. This will require students with significant technical training, which will be much more commonly found from advanced undergraduates or masters students in Computer Science/Engineering. This has a lot of potential for cross-departmental efforts and collaboration, but you will need people with an understanding of how to approach such projects. "Can you help us code for this widget" is likely to close more doors than it opens. But if you have computer/technical programs on campus with entrepreneurship interests of their own, it could be the beginning of a good relationship.
If you don't want to customize the technical aspect at all, I suppose you could stick with survey methods that just has students do reports on existing markets and products, etc.
You could also just get one to say you have it, of course. Maybe get it a nice display case, and when you bring visitors in point it out, tell them you have it, and maybe let them try it on. Not very educational, but I suppose it can serve some political purposes. Tell people who ask that it's available for faculty and students to "do projects and research [and stuff]" - keep it nice and vague. (I'm only a little kidding - I suspect this is a large part of current markets for similar technology.)
The biggest opportunity, in my mind, is using your interest (and budget) as an investment towards cross-disciplinary efforts with technology-heavy programs on your campus - an iSchool if you have one, CS/CSE, etc. The equipment is both enabling (not cheap and you need it to really work in the area and explore potential applications), and can be a rallying point if you have student and faculty interest in exploring potential applications.
The simplest and most exciting fact of these new technologies is that honestly no one really knows for sure what to do with them yet. Everything is rapidly evolving and uncertain, and there is a great combination of socio-technical problems that will need to be uncovered and addressed over the next 10-20 years. If you can get together even a small group of people interesting in exploring this space - and find a way to make it fit the culture of your field and institution - there's certainly plenty of opportunity to be had.
For the details of what to buy, that's putting the cart before the horse - find the people who want to explore it and work with it, and let them propose to you a mini-grant to obtain the equipment they think will best suit their interest.
