On the 22nd of April 2026, Professor Dr. Ian Biscoe took the stage at the SURF Futures Day at TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht alongside Rufus Baas of Mediacollege Amsterdam and OASYS for a presentation and workshop on the role of XR and immersive technology in education.
The future is immersive, and it’s here!
This day was all about alternative futures of education and research. The session brought together perspectives from the Trans Realities Lab @ Design Academy Eindhoven, and Mediacollege Amsterdam to look at how networked XR is reshaping creative and technical education across institutional boundaries.
Ian and Rufus explored the opportunities that immersive technologies offer for collaboration with industry, cross-sector partnerships between vocational, higher, and academic education, and the integration of AI into these new shared learning environments.
The session drew on the TRL’s ongoing work with XR-IT, the Hybrid Lab project, and recent collaborations with HKU University of the Arts Utrecht and HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, showing how distributed virtual environments can bring together students, technicians and industry partners in genuinely co-creative ways.
SURF Futures Day is aimed at executives, directors and policy advisors strategically involved in shaping the digital transformation of Dutch research and education. The accompanying workshop offered attendees a hands-on opportunity to engage with the practical questions that follow: how do institutions invest, partner, train staff and design curricula around immersive infrastructure that is moving from experimental to operational? For the TRL, the day continued a sustained conversation with SURF and the wider Dutch education network about what scalable, pedagogically sound networked XR can look like, and who needs to be in the room to build it.