The newly published “Learning in Shared Virtual Spaces” case study report and accompanying video – published by SURF, the Dutch National Research and Education Network (NREN) – document a collaboration led by the Trans Realities Lab (TRL) at Design Academy Eindhoven, working with the Artistic Extended Reality Lab at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, and the IX Lab at HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht.
The report examines how networked XR environments can support co-creative collaboration in design education across geographically dispersed locations. At its heart is a project run between October and December 2025, in which mixed teams of DAE and HKU students collaborated in workshops over a month inside a shared virtual environment. The implementation was based on the TRL’s XR-IT (extended Realities – Intraverse Toolkit) platform, with extensions to support the Resonite framework favoured by HKU. XR-IT bridged the three physical locations (in Eindhoven and Utrecht) with students at DAE working in Unreal Engine, while students at HKU edited in Resonite and observed in higher-fidelity in Unreal.
The case study traces the full picture: the technical infrastructure across three labs operating at very different scales and budgets (high-end, mid-range and low-end CAVE-based), the pedagogical approach centred on project-based and collaborative learning, the organisational realities of inter-institutional IT and security, and what students themselves learnt about flexibility, communication and the question of when XR and collaborative virtual worlds are actually the right tool for a given design challenge.
“You can’t innovate if you work only before you start to figure out exactly where you want to end up. You have to be prepared to take a different turn along the way,” reflects Joris Weijdom of HKU, capturing the iterative spirit that runs through the project.
For institutions considering their own move into networked XR, the report distils ten practical recommendations – from starting with educational needs rather than technology, to investing in middleware over hardware, to involving IT departments from day one. It also makes a clear case that meaningful co-creative XR is achievable across a wide range of budgets, not only at the high end.
The publication is part of SURF’s broader exploration of campus innovation and contributes to the ongoing development of the XR-IT toolkit, which aims to make distributed XR collaboration accessible to a growing network of educational institutions in the Netherlands and beyond.
The Trans Realities Lab is seeking further partners who wish to explore inter-institutional collaboration in immersive envrionments.
📄 Read the full case study here.