Thursday, Sept. 25, 2025 | 2 a.m.
Editor’s note: Este artículo está traducido al español.
J ayden Barr and Elijah Davis are deep in an “Indiana Jones”-style adventure at the UNLV Lied Library searching for a pearl protected by an ancient curse.
They navigate dark corridors by flickering torchlight, battling gusty winds and rumbling floors that shake beneath their feet.
Yet despite the wind whipping their clothes and the ground trembling underfoot, the pair hasn’t taken a single step outside the library.
Instead, Barr and Davis are immersed in “Curse of the Lost Pearl,” a virtual reality experience playing out within a free roam pod tucked into the back of UNLV’s new Dreamscape Learn Center. This space, brimming with cutting-edge VR technology, will offer university students, faculty and staff educational opportunities through immersive experiences.
The university launched the innovative center Monday on the second floor of the library. It represents the first of many programs being woven into campus life as part of a yearslong initiative to establish UNLV as a leader in immersive learning.
“I am just so grateful that we took the leap because, to me, there’s no doubt that it will benefit the students,” said Aundrea Frahm, the inaugural director of immersive learning at UNLV. “Having experience with (virtual reality) will benefit them because almost every industry will have extended realities in the future in some capacity. And so for these groups of students, I hope that they are able to come in and feel like they have a place to be innovative; feel like they have a place to experiment; and that they can really learn and grow in the capacities that they want to.”
Virtual reality is one part of the extended reality, or “XR,” umbrella, Frahm said. It allows users to create and enter virtual spaces through technology such as specialized headsets with goggles and earphones and body-trackers for hands or feet.
Augmented reality takes elements of the digital world and attempts to combine them with the real world. One example is the widely used Pokémon GO mobile game, where users can search for and capture virtual Pokémon, with the little monsters appearing in real-life locations viewed through the phone’s camera lens.
Mixed reality lies between the two, allowing the user to interact with and manipulate items or environments in the physical and virtual world using sensing and imaging technologies.
Frahm was brought on in October 2024 to lead the inaugural team tasked with bringing immersive technology to UNLV and expanding opportunities for alternative forms of learning. The devices aren’t meant to replace traditional textbooks and classrooms at UNLV but to supplement them, she stressed.
She previously opened the VR/AR Classroom and Innovation Studio at Southern Utah University and has worked for nearly a decade as a sculpture instructor at UNLV.
With Dreamscape Learn, the university becomes the second institution nationally — after Arizona State University — to establish a facility for the technology.
Plans to create an immersive learning program have been in motion since at least 2024, when the university announced its partnership with Dreamscape Learn, the company behind the Dreamscape Learn Center’s software.
Former UNLV President Keith Whitfield discussed in January during his State of the University address how younger generations — especially after the COVID-19 pandemic — were spending more time online, whether that’s chatting through places like Discord or running around in virtual worlds through Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, FIFA or Madden.
Where many saw those online activities as “just games,” Whitfield took it as an opportunity to learn, he said.
Interim President Chris Heavey, who served as executive vice president and provost under Whitfield, has also put his support behind the efforts to incorporate VR more widely inUNLV acadenucs.
Six professors have already decided to incorporate virtual reality technologies into classes of theirs this fall.
“We’re doing like a lot of institutions are trying to do, which is to try to figure out … how we can use technology to provide an education for students at scale that has lots of different opportunities to it,” Whitfield told the Sun in January. “Learning should be fun, and we can take this thing that I think people used to think of as just game playing and actually make it so that it’s learning, and games with learning is actually even more fun.”
Instead of simply looking at pictures in a textbook, students will don a chunky black headset with virtual goggles and headphones that — after some bodily calibration done with the help of sensors installed among the room — will transport them virtually into, for instance, a digitally rendered version of the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque in Istanbul.
While learning about the history of the mosque, students can swivel their head around to view the towering domed ceiling and walls lined with Christian and Islamic artwork as a narrator recounts how the Hagia Sophia started as a Christian church but was later converted into a mosque, then a church, and back into a mosque.
It’s a full-body experience in some cases, with activities where students use their hands to virtually shine a light onto mosaics of figures to reveal patterns on the tiles.
At one point, the desk chair rumbles and shakes as a video of the Hagia Sophia’s doors are pushed open by Ottomans with the narrator jumping into another explanation on the mosque’s lengthy history.
The Hagia Sophia and two other programs can be used for a number of classes and majors, Frahm said.
While some might use the Hagia Sophia program for courses in architecture or art history, assistant professor in hospitality Marta Soligo plans to utilize it in her tourism and society classes to teach about the concept of heritage and cultural tourism.
It’s something that’s often seen with museums and religious spaces and will be “a prime example” in her discussions on cases of contested heritage, she said.
Frahm believes extended reality technology will one day touch almost every industry. It’s important students get experience with the devices and software to make them better candidates for a changing workforce.
Having the opportunity to practice real-world situations in simulated virtual worlds could also prove useful in the future and further help prepare students for the problems they could encounter while working in places like a hotel lobby, restaurant or other fast-changing job environments, Soligo explained.
“We are known for being a real-world college … so it’s very important that students understand the implications of new technologies,” Soligo said in a news release. “This is another way to give students a taste of the real-world experience.”
The Dreamscape Learn Center is the hub of UNLV’s campaign for more immersive learning initiatives. But it’s only one of many projects that Frahm and her team are working on.
Next spring, UNLV will be instituting what Frahm called “agnostic VR classrooms,” two spaces in other areas of the campus equipped with stand-alone VR headsets that contain “a plethora of educational software.”
Applications range from career readiness tools to help students develop soft skills, to specific programs such as anatomy software where students can select and isolate specific parts of the body to study in detail.
Frahm and her team are also looking at other opportunities to bring in more immersive learning technology and how they can weave other extended realities, like mixed or augmented reality, into other majors’ curriculum.
The technology is limited, and often expensive, but Frahm said there had been an explosion of interest from various industry partners looking to explore extended reality technology.
A six-student team under Frahm’s guidance is developing content that she believes could help with drawing the interest of more faculty members and industry partners.
“There is some perception that extended realities is a flash in the pan and that it’s going to go away. … But I feel like our students have the opportunity in this innovative arena to grow, and they are the ones to build the future for us in these innovative spaces,” Frahm said. “It’s about providing them with the resources, the time, the accessibility to those resources and the training or learning to be able to do that because I just believe in them. I have faith in who they are as people and that our future can be a brilliant one with these young minds.”