After musicians, virtual audience helps to train up business leaders
BUSINESS leaders with a dose of prepresentation nerves can now turn to a simulator originally designed to prepare young musicians for recitals.
The Royal College of Music in South Kensington developed its performance simulator so students could practise in front of a virtual audience.
The musician enters the booth from a backstage area and plays a recital in front of a large screen featuring a roomful of listeners.
Distractions can be cranked up to include coughing, sneezing and smartphones going off. The performance is filmed and the musician can be connected to a heart rate monitor.
Now Imperial College Business School is using the technology to train future business leaders. In its version, speak- ers give a presentation in front of a virtual three-person panel.
Beate Baldwin, head of open enrolment programmes and marketing at ICBS, said: “We’re training future leaders, businesspeople or managers.
“The simulator is about experiencing uncertainty, stress, how to recuperate from the stress and how to better prepare the next time. Musicians and businesspeople are both performers and the performance is as important as the content.”
Professor Aaron Williamon, head of the RCM’s Centre for Performance Science, said: “We’re looking to train the next generation of performers and this technology gives them a virtual performance space.
“We want to put them out on stage under pressure so they can actually experience what that’s like.”
Visitors to the Imperial Festival, held at the university’s South Kensington campus, off Exhibition Road, at the weekend were able to try it out in both concert and audition modes.