Working Papers.

Working Paper Industry #3

Meetings in the Enterprise Metaverse:

How Virtual Reality Affects Scaled Business Agility.

Nilusha Aliman, Thorsten Hennig-Thurau & André Henke

Team meetings have been at the heart of businesses worldwide for a long time, regardless of industry and region. Today’s stand-alone, mass-market VR devices offered by firms like Meta, HTC, and Pico open new possibilities for team meetings and are considered an alternative for physical meetings, but particularly for remote meetings that are carried out via videoconferencing tools such as Zoom and Skype. Research has pointed at the advantages of using VR for team meetings in terms of higher levels of so-called social presence compared to videoconferencing, but has also named increased effort and exhaustion of participants. Which effect dominates in real-world conditions has remained unclear so far. This research reports two separate, but related experimental studies in which managers of a public German organization use either videoconferencing or VR headsets for PI-planning meetings and how the technology affected their scaled business agility. The findings suggest that in terms of agility and other outcomes of interest, entering the enterprise metaverse is no dystopia, but can be worthwhile.

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Working Paper Industry #2

Was das Metaverse für Unternehmen wirklich bedeutet: Reale Wertschöpfung mit der Virtuellen Welt von heute.

Thorsten Hennig-Thurau & Björn Ognibeni

Seit Facebook Meta heißt, ist das "Metaverse" in aller Munde. Einige warnen vor einem Hype, andere wittern neues Geschäft. Tatsächlich bergen die virtuellen 3-D-Welten große Chancen für Unternehmen – in drei Bereichen.

Download full text here (abgedruckt im Harvard Business manager 7/2022 unter dem Titel „Auf ins Metaverse“)

Working Paper Science #1

The Value of Real-Time Multisensory Social Interactions in the Virtual-Reality Metaverse

Framework, Empirical Probes, and Research Roadmap

Thorsten Hennig-Thurau, Nilusha Aliman, Alina Herting, Gerrit Cziehso, Raoul Kübler & Marc Linder

Real-time multisensory social interactions (RMSIs) between people are at the center of the virtual-reality “metaverse,” a new computer-mediated environment in which people act and communicate with each other in real-time via avatars in virtual “worlds” accessed through virtual-reality devices. This research investigates whether RMSIs in the virtual-reality metaverse can generate more value for interactants in terms of interaction outcomes (interaction performance, evaluation, and emotional responses) than those on the 2D internet (e.g., Zoom meetings). The authors present a tentative theoretical framework of how RMSIs in the virtual-reality metaverse versus on the 2D internet affect interaction outcomes through interactants’ intermediate conditions. The results of subsequent extensive empirical probes are in line with several aspects of the framework, but contradict the idea of a general superiority of RMSIs in the virtual-reality metaverse. The authors thus combine theory and empirical insights for developing a refined framework that serves as roadmap for future research.