Gerald Ajam

Immersive and extended reality

Immersion is a property of an experience, not an outcome of one. The question worth asking is never whether learners felt present, but whether being there let them do something they could not otherwise have done.

Status Position

Published August 2026Revised September 2026

All work

Why it matters

Extended reality arrives with an unusually strong feeling of self-evidence. Putting on a headset is genuinely striking, and people reliably report that it was memorable. The trouble is that memorability of the medium and durability of the learning are different things, and the first is much easier to produce than the second.

This matters because headsets are expensive, logistically demanding, and consume a share of curriculum time that has to come from somewhere. A technology that produces enthusiasm without producing understanding is not neutral. It has a cost, and the cost is paid in the thing it displaced.

What I have come to believe

There is a real and narrow set of cases where spatial media does something no other medium can. Scale is one — things too large, too small, too fast, or too slow to be perceived directly. Danger is another, where rehearsal in the real setting is unacceptable. Invisibility is a third: fields, flows, and forces that have no everyday appearance. Perspective is a fourth, where occupying a position other than your own is the actual learning objective. When a topic sits in one of those, the case is strong and I will argue for it.

Outside them, a well-made diagram, a physical model, or a good demonstration usually wins on cost, robustness, and the amount of thinking it demands of the learner. That last point is the one most often missed. Rich sensory input can reduce the amount of construction a learner has to do, and construction is where the learning lives. An experience that hands you everything can leave you with nothing.

I also think the field systematically underweights what happens after the headset comes off. The consolidating conversation — what did you notice, what surprised you, what does it mean — is doing an enormous share of the work, and it is the part most likely to be cut when time runs short.

How I approach it

I ask what learning action the experience is meant to enable, and then I ask what the cheapest medium is that would enable the same action. If the answer is a diagram, we make the diagram. Choosing the smaller intervention when it does the same job is not conservatism — it is the discipline that makes the case credible on the occasions when the expensive option really is the right one.

When the headset does earn its place, I plan the conversation afterwards before I plan the experience. If there is no time for the debrief, there is no time for the headset either.

In short

The position in four claims

The argument above, cut down to what travels.

  • Presence is a means

    Feeling there counts only if being there lets the learner do something they could not otherwise do.

  • Four cases earn the headset

    Scale, danger, invisibility and perspective. Outside those, a diagram, a model or a demonstration usually does the job for less.

  • Richness can remove the thinking

    An experience that supplies everything leaves the learner nothing to construct. Construction is where the learning happens.

  • The debrief does the work

    The conversation after the headset comes off consolidates the experience. It is also the first thing cut when time runs short.

In practice

The questions I ask

Before designing anything in this domain, and again when something is not working.

  1. What learning action is this experience meant to make possible?
  2. Does the topic sit in one of the four cases: scale, danger, invisibility or perspective?
  3. What is the cheapest medium that would enable the same action?
  4. What does the learner have to build in their own head, and what does the experience build for them?
  5. Where is the time for the conversation afterwards, and what is it for?
  6. What does this displace from the timetable?

Immersion earns its cost only where being there is the lesson.

Unsettled

What I would still argue about

The honest list. These are open in my own head, not rhetorical.

  • How much of the measured advantage in the literature is a novelty effect that would decay if the same learners used the medium 20 times rather than once.
  • Whether perspective-taking experiences produce durable change in how someone reasons, or a strong short-lived emotional response that reads like it.
  • Where the line actually falls between productive sensory richness and the kind that quietly removes the need to think.
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