How VR Is Being Used in Higher Education

Virtual reality is moving from experimental novelty to embedded curriculum across universities worldwide.

Here’s what that actually looks like in practice, and why it matters to educational institutions exploring virtual reality technology.

Why Is Higher Education Turning to VR?

Virtual reality has existed in some form for decades, but its presence in higher education remained largely peripheral until recently. A convergence of factors has changed that.

Hardware costs have fallen significantly. Headsets that once required institutional budgets now sit within reach of individual departments, and many VR platforms also run on standard laptops or desktop computers, removing the headset as a barrier entirely. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic forced universities to reckon with the limits of video conferencing as a substitute for experiential, hands-on learning. Zoom could deliver a lecture. It couldn’t put a student in a hospital ward, a courtroom, or a laboratory.

The evidence base has also strengthened. Research published by PwC found that VR-based training can be four times faster and 52% cheaper than traditional methods at scale. A study by the Council of Deans of Health concluded that simulation-based education consistently outperforms traditional clinical education in improving knowledge, clinical judgment, critical thinking, and clinical competencies. Surveys of educators paint a similar picture: 93% of teachers believe VR improves teaching quality and student engagement.

The market reflects this momentum. The global AR and VR in education sector was valued at around $11.9 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $75 billion by 2033. What was once a research curiosity is becoming standard infrastructure.

Examples of Virtual Reality Being Used in Higher Education

The following case studies span healthcare, science, law, and education design. Together, they illustrate the breadth of applications now emerging across universities using VR as a core teaching tool.

UCL School of Pharmacy: Widening Access Through a Digital Twin Lab

Institution: University College London (UCL), UK Discipline: Pharmacy and life sciences One of the most developed and award-winning examples of VR in higher education in the UK comes from UCL’s School of Pharmacy, where Dr. Stephen Hilton and his research group built a digital twin of their physical laboratories.

The platform, known as UCL School of Pharmacy Digital Outreach, replicates the university’s real facilities as an immersive virtual environment. School pupils anywhere in the world can put on a VR headset and walk into UCL’s undergraduate laboratories, interact with AI avatar staff members, and explore a digitized version of the university’s award-winning Greenlight Pharmacy. What might have required a trip to London, a formal visit day, or a competitive placement can now happen from anywhere.

The educational results have been substantial. By training students through the digital twin before they encounter physical equipment, UCL found that users who accessed VR prior to lab inductions were able to operate safely far more quickly than those who hadn’t. The group has used the platform to train over 200 first-year students in a single week on complex High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) equipment, a process that would have been prohibitively time-consuming and costly using physical machines alone.

The work has drawn significant recognition. In November 2024, an international team including UCL School of Pharmacy won a prestigious Royal Society of Chemistry Horizon Prize for Education for their creation of the 3DI Virtual Reality Institute, a digital space enabling students and researchers from across the globe to meet, train, and collaborate. The project has also received a Pearson HE Innovate Silver Team Award and a UCL Provost Education Team Award.

Dr. Hilton’s view of the technology is notably grounded: “VR is an all-in-one object for interaction, not purely an immersion device.” At UCL, it’s being used not just to simulate the real world, but to extend and improve upon what physical teaching can offer.

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University of East London: Embedding VR Across an Entire Nursing Curriculum

Institution: University of East London (UEL), UK Platform: Oxford Medical Simulation (OMS) Discipline: Nursing and allied health

In 2021, the team at the University of East London began overhauling their simulation resources. Physical clinical placements had become constrained, and the university wanted to find a technology-driven way to ensure students could still build practical skills. As Robert Waterson, Dean of the School of Health, Sport and Bioscience, put it: “We have a view of using technology to move us forward.”

After selecting Oxford Medical Simulation as their VR partner, UEL embedded OMS scenarios throughout their three-year BSc nursing program. The platform runs alongside modules covering clinical reasoning, anatomy and physiology, and communication. Crucially, it’s accessible via both VR headset and standard on-screen desktop, which Waterson described as “a game changer for the future” in terms of flexible, equitable access.

The impact on student learning has been measurable. In a two-day simulation process, students spend the first day working through virtual patient scenarios via the on-screen platform. On the second day, faculty running physical simulation exercises observed that students were markedly better in practice after their virtual preparation, with improved communication skills and a clearer ability to execute clinical processes.

Students also use the platform independently at home. Data showed that UEL students were logging in more frequently from home than on campus, a sign of genuine engagement rather than passive compliance. Clinical Lecturer Elaine Gervaise described the dynamic clearly: “Learners enjoy VR because it builds up their confidence. It allows them to make mistakes where they can learn from them, in a safe environment.”

What started in nursing has since expanded across the institution. All health-related courses at UEL now integrate VR technology, including physiotherapy, occupational therapy, physician assistant, podiatry, and midwifery programs.

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The Open University: A Virtual Courtroom for Legal Education

Institution: The Open University, UK Discipline: Law Source: SCiLAB, The Open University

Advocacy is difficult to teach at a distance. Mooting, the practice of arguing legal cases before a simulated judge, has long been a cornerstone of legal education. It builds research skills, confidence, and the kind of formal presence that can’t be developed through reading alone. For students at The Open University, a distance learning institution, access to a physical moot courtroom had never been straightforward.

In 2021, academics from the OU Law School began developing a virtual courtroom (VCR) to address this directly. Built in Unity using a multiplayer first-person design, the environment allows students to enter a realistic courtroom space, take their position at the advocate bench, sit and stand in role, and communicate with other participants in real time. The experience replicates many features of actual virtual court hearings, which themselves became common practice during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a pilot study, six students participated in a moot within the VCR, some experienced and some novice. Feedback was notably positive. One student described the experience: “Visually seeing people did help a little bit. It made it feel like you were sitting there together doing it. It felt like you were in the room.” Another contrasted it with standard video calls: “It was much more engaging than doing a general Zoom or Teams chat. You could get into the spirit of things.”

Students noted that the VCR felt more formal than a video call, which matters in legal education where the gravity of professional proceedings is part of what students need to understand and inhabit. The research team identified early navigation challenges, which they noted could be resolved by giving students early access to familiarize themselves with the environment before a formal session.

The Open University sees potential well beyond the degree program. The virtual courtroom could be used to support litigants in person preparing for real hearings, to train legal professionals, and to prepare police and social workers for the courtroom environment.

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Harvard University: Building a Digital Twin Campus and Teaching VR as a Design Medium

Institution: Harvard University, USA Disciplines: Earth and planetary sciences, education technology design

Harvard’s engagement with VR in higher education operates at two levels: using immersive technology as an institutional tool, and teaching students to understand and design with it themselves.

At the institutional level, the Virtual Harvard Project, led by Rus Gant at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, set out to build a digital twin of the entire Harvard campus using state-of-the-art 3D scanning and modeling technology. The aim wasn’t to replace the physical campus, but to provide remote and hybrid students with an experience that goes far beyond video conferencing. The project was framed around a clear principle: the virtual environment should feel real enough that users focus on teaching, learning, and social interaction rather than the technology itself.

Separately, Harvard Extension School offers Designing Educational Media (DGMD E-55), a course that examines how educational media is built across contexts from K-12 to workplace training, and equips students to design prototypes of their own. VR sits within the range of technologies the course explores, and students are expected to evaluate it critically as a learning tool, not simply use it. This is an example of universities teaching the next generation of learning designers to think carefully about when and how immersive technology serves genuine educational purposes.

Both threads reflect a broader shift in how leading institutions are approaching virtual reality for education: not as a standalone technology experiment, but as part of a considered pedagogical strategy.

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Which Disciplines Are Adopting VR in Higher Education Most Quickly?

The case studies above span pharmacy, nursing, law, and education design, but they represent a fraction of the disciplines now incorporating immersive learning. Certain fields have moved particularly fast.

Healthcare and Nursing

This is the most mature and evidence-rich area of VR adoption in higher education. The combination of high-stakes practice, limited clinical placement capacity, and the need for repeated, standardized simulation makes VR a near-ideal fit. Universities across the UK and US have moved from single pilot schemes to institution-wide integration, and the evidence base for improved outcomes is strong. Research consistently shows that VR simulation for healthcare is more effective than traditional clinical education for improving knowledge, clinical judgment, and competency.

Law

Advocacy, mooting, and courtroom procedure are all experiential skills that are difficult to teach through text or video alone. VR offers law students the ability to inhabit formal proceedings, which matters because the psychological experience of being in a courtroom is itself part of what they need to learn. The Open University’s virtual courtroom is an early but credible example, and interest is growing in using similar environments for police interview training and tribunal simulations.

Science and Engineering

Laboratory equipment is expensive, takes up physical space, and often carries health and safety implications for untrained users. VR allows universities to give students repeated, consequence-free access to complex equipment before they ever touch the physical version. UCL’s experience with HPLC training is a clear example, and similar approaches are being used across chemistry, engineering, and biomedical science departments worldwide.

Business and Design Education

Several business schools, including UC Irvine’s Paul Merage School of Business, have created full digital twin metaversity campuses in partnership with platforms like VictoryXR, allowing students to collaborate and present work in immersive environments. In design disciplines, VR is both a subject of study and a production tool, with programs increasingly expecting students to understand extended reality as part of their professional skill set.

Humanities and Social Sciences

Adoption is earlier-stage here, but growing. VR is being used to place history students inside reconstructed environments, to support empathy-based learning in social work and counseling programs, and to facilitate immersive fieldwork substitutes in geography and anthropology. The research into VR as an “empathy machine” has attracted particular interest from educators working in areas where perspective-taking is a core learning objective.

What These Examples Tell Us About the Direction of VR in Education

Taken together, the examples above point to a few consistent themes in how VR is being used in higher education.

The most effective deployments aren’t about novelty. UCL, UEL, the Open University, and Harvard aren’t using VR because it’s interesting. They’re using it because it solves specific problems: access barriers, placement shortages, the difficulty of teaching high-stakes procedural skills, and the limitations of video conferencing as a substitute for physical presence.

Immersion changes the quality of the learning experience in ways that matter. Students report that VR environments feel more formal, more engaging, and more transferable to real-world practice than screen-based alternatives. When a nursing student makes a medication decision in a VR scenario, the stakes feel real enough to produce genuine learning. That psychological dimension is difficult to replicate through any other digital medium.

And the trajectory is clearly upward. As hardware becomes more accessible, platforms more flexible, and the evidence base stronger, VR in higher education is shifting from an experimental add-on to a standard component of how universities design learning at scale.

For anyone working in learning and development, training design, or health and safety education, that’s worth paying attention to.