Immersive Media Emerges as the Classroom Frontier for Learning and Storytelling

“Students become active participants and can really have choices in solving problems and collaborating with their peers through team-oriented efforts to really kind of foster a deeper sense of agency in the content.”

Erin Reilly, Professor of Practice and Founding Director of the Texas Immersive Institute at the University of Texas at Austin

Immersive media is no longer confined to labs or technology showcases. Across higher education, universities are beginning to treat virtual, augmented, and mixed reality as integral to teaching and research. The change signals a growing recognition that these tools are not just technical experiments but part of a larger rethinking of how students encounter knowledge.

Institutions are investing in dedicated programs and building out initiatives that move immersive technologies into classrooms. Universities as departments are looking for new ways to combine academic content with environments that encourage active participation. The momentum is no longer limited to computer science or engineering. Fields such as history, communications, and environmental studies are beginning to explore how immersive design can create new modes of teaching.

This shift comes at a moment when higher education is facing growing pressure to adapt. Employers are demanding skills that extend beyond memorization; students are seeking more engaging forms of instruction; and new technologies are challenging the long-standing reliance on lectures as the primary mode of delivery. Immersive media has emerged as one response to these pressures.

To better understand how immersive media is reshaping the classroom and the pedagogical models behind it, we spoke with Erin Reilly, founding director of the Texas Immersive Institute, who offered detailed insights on the opportunities and challenges of building education around these new environments.

Erin Reilly is a creator, educator, and strategist. Her career spans more than 25 years, during which she has invented new approaches, products, services, and experiences for storytelling and audience engagement through immersive technology.

Reilly currently serves as professor of practice in the Stan Richards School of Advertising and Public Relations as well as founding director of Texas Immersive Institute, the interactive and immersive media hub at the University of Texas at Austin, focused on research, projects, and learning the future of media. In her role, she has developed a new sequence of courses, guides faculty and students in imagining where innovation meets entrepreneurshi,p and builds university-wide initiatives, fostering relationships with other academic institutions and industry partners. She also integrated the Meta Quest 2 VR headset as the textbook for the Audience Development & Engagement class (this was a first for a UT Austin classroom).

As a strategist, Reilly consults with private and public companies in the areas of audience engagement, creative strategy, and transmedia storytelling. She has been a frequent guest lecturer worldwide at universities as well as industry conferences such as TEDx, SXSW, and Austin Forum on Technology & Society. She is on the Hasbro Innovator list and is currently raising the second round of funding for CARPE’ Games, a new augmented reality and SMART kit game, and Winklebeans, a sensor-based toy that connects to a data-driven story world.

She was a founding member of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, holding the positions of managing creative director and research fellow from 2010 to 2018. Before that, she was research director for Project New Media Literacies at MIT and has conducted classes as a visiting lecturer at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies and Harvard University’s Project Zero Summer Institute. She is a graduate of Emerson College and holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in film/multimedia from Maine Media Workshops + College.

The core difference between immersive and traditional learning lies in how students encounter information. Conventional classrooms rely on reading and lectures, which can separate learners from the subject matter. Immersive environments surround students with the material itself, turning a concept into something lived rather than described. When history is taught through slides or timelines, the past can feel static. In a reconstructed environment, however, students can walk through a city, observe how architecture functioned, and understand cultural change through direct experience.

A striking example comes from augmented overlays on ancient sites. Walking among ruins provides only fragments of what once stood, while an immersive reconstruction shows the library, marketplace, or temple in its original form.

As Erin Reilly explains, “It allows for students to step into environments where they can feel the lesson like walking through ancient Rome in a virtual reality experience, or perhaps using augmented reality at a specific location. I was just in Greece. And we were walking the ruins and I thought, I wish I had my phone up to really see what Hadrian’s library looks like in its heyday, and then to really understand how over time these came to be.”

The ability to toggle between present remains and past realities trains students to see continuity and change, building a deeper historical imagination.

Immersion also shifts the classroom dynamic toward collaboration and agency. “Students become active participants and can really have choices in solving problems and collaborating with their peers through team-oriented efforts to really kind of foster a deeper sense of agency in the content,” Reilly notes. This approach aligns with project-based learning models that emphasize practice and problem-solving over memorization.

The rise of generative AI has made these shifts more urgent. Reilly recalls a student completing homework by outsourcing the work entirely: “He was literally scrolling on his Instagram and had SachiBT answer all of his math homework while I was sitting next to him.”

For her, the anecdote points to a broader challenge that education must create experiences that cannot be replaced by a chatbot. “We as teachers need to change the way we’re teaching people [even subjects like] math… how could you create an immersive experience for them to fully understand geometry in a space rather than just give me the formula?”

The expansion of immersive media into classrooms has not been without obstacles.

The first and most pressing challenge is accessibility. While headsets and mixed reality devices have become more affordable, they remain out of reach for many students and institutions. Ensuring equal access is critical, since immersive environments lose their educational promise if only a fraction of the class can participate.

“The biggest thing that I tried addressing when I started Texas Immersive Institute was equity and accessibility,” Reilly says. “So if students have equal access to devices… the money allocated to the Institute when we launched this literally was to buy all the equipment so we could, so we can make sure that any student could use it.”

Accessibility extends beyond finances. There is also the physical experience of immersion that can present real barriers, from motion sickness to claustrophobia. Reilly shares, “I had some students who have real physical abilities, such as motion sickness. It’s getting better with VR, but sometimes when we’re testing new ideas, they’re not made that great. So, it can make you feel a little awkward or uncomfortable, or people I’ve even had say I feel claustrophobic in them.” Researchers are now beginning to specialize in these issues, with one of her former students now pursuing a PhD in XR accessibility.

Beyond devices and design, immersive learning also requires a cultural shift among educators. Many instructors are accustomed to being the authority at the front of the room, rather than a facilitator.

“Not seeing that sage on the stage, but one guide on the side,” Reilly considers, “is very unfamiliar for some teachers who really enjoy [being seen as] I’m the expert, I need to impart my knowledge.” Meanwhile, developing new facilitation skills and integrating immersive media into scaffolding and assessment takes training, time, and institutional support. Without investment in professional development, adoption will remain uneven.

Immersive media’s potential is not limited to enhancing lectures or coursework. The same qualities that make it a powerful teaching tool, like embodiment, sensory activation, and agency, can also be mobilized to address urgent social and environmental issues. For example, Anchored Memories, a project in development at the Texas Immersive Institute, illustrates how immersive storytelling can translate abstract data about climate change into experiences that people can feel and respond to.

The project began with a personal observation. “I saw personally, family and friends’ beachside homes being washed away in just two short decades in Northeast Maine. And I took it really personally and I thought, wow, I want others to grasp the sense of what it means to lose your home,” Reilly recalls. The losses were no longer distant news stories; they were lived experiences of communities she knew. That urgency has been echoed in the Texas Hill Country, where heavy flooding has left rivers swollen, and in disasters abroad, from Japan’s tsunami to storms across South Asia.

Anchored Memories transforms these realities into a narrative that participants live through. In the story, the user takes the role of a child whose family home is gradually overtaken by rising water. Haptic design simulates rain, wind, and the sensation of water climbing higher across the decades. The immersive arc ends not with the house itself but with a reminder of what endures: “I wanted to create an experience that we could bring into communities to help these communities understand that a house doesn’t make a home, but a home is about your family.”

For students, developing a project like this becomes an exercise in both storytelling and civic engagement, asking them to connect technical design with empathy and ethics. For communities, it serves as a catalyst for preparedness and dialogue, demonstrating that immersive media can function as both a civic technology and an educational one. Rather than treating climate change as abstract statistics, Anchored Memories offers a way to understand the stakes in human terms, and to prepare for futures that are arriving faster than expected.

As immersive media moves further into classrooms, its trajectory will depend on how policymakers, educators, and students respond to both its promise and its challenges.

Funding remains the foundation. Without support for equipment, labs, and training, access will stay limited to well-resourced institutions, reinforcing divides that technology was supposed to close.

Reilly points to earlier efforts in digital equity as a model: “I was part of when Angus King was governor… he was the first governor to do a 1-to-1 laptop initiative and give a laptop to every middle school child. And I think the same thing with immersive tech could be done, as we have these new tools. Instead of just creating a computer lab, why not create an immersive media lab?” The question is whether governments and universities will treat immersive environments as essential infrastructure, not discretionary projects.

For educators, the task is cultural as much as technical. Immersive teaching requires a willingness to rethink the instructor’s role. “Be willing to take risks and do a pedagogical shift… not focusing so much on lecture, but more on agency,” Reilly argues. Many teachers are accustomed to being the central authority in the room. Yet, immersive projects require them to act as facilitators, guiding students through problem-solving rather than delivering fixed answers. Professional development and institutional support will determine whether faculty can make that shift with confidence.

For students, the role of immersive media will be measured by how well it prepares them to think critically and apply knowledge in practice. Reilly sees value in giving learners the chance to test, fail, and adapt inside environments that mirror the complexity of the real world. That principle is linked to the broader goals of policymakers and educators, including equity, professional development, and a willingness to redesign pedagogy.

Taken together, these steps show that immersive media has entered a pivotal stage. It is no longer an experiment on the margins, but a growing framework that could redefine how institutions teach, how students learn, and how society prepares for challenges that cannot be solved through lectures alone.