The Miami Beach Urban Studios (MBUS) at Florida International University is available to all members of the FIU campus community and has more printers available than any other FIU location, making it popular with students. But it is in Miami Beach, approximately 16 miles from the main FIU campus located in the western part of Miami-Dade County. Although intended to broaden the FIU student experience—in the words of John Stuart, associate dean for cultural and community engagement and executive director of MBUS, "akin to offering a techno-cultural-scientific study abroad within the vast city"—this is still a significant distance for busy students, particularly in a city with the kind of traffic that Miami is known for. To scale up XR teaching capacity beyond MBUS, FIU is establishing a VR lab on the main campus, focused on introducing the technology to students in the university's First-Year Experience courses.

Many logistical issues present themselves in developing such a facility: identifying an appropriate space, identifying hardware and software configurations for such a space, staffing the space with support staff knowledgeable in the technology, outreach to the campus community, etc. This section will briefly address each of these issues but with the caveat that this is a moving target: XR hardware and software are undergoing rapid development, and XR labs are still relatively new, so nothing like best practices has yet emerged.

XR technology actually requires not one space but two. The first type of space is a more or less traditional computer lab. People working on XR development with their computers can be located anywhere—in a lab, in the developer's office, in the campus coffee shop, on the sofa at home. But this section will stick to a discussion of lab spaces.

The difference between a "traditional" computer lab and one with support for XR is based not on the space but on the computers. Any computer used for XR development must be high-end: a powerful CPU and graphics card, a great deal of RAM, and a high-resolution screen are the bare minimum requirements.1 Computers designed for gaming often come configured with such a feature set. Such high-end computers tend to be fairly expensive, so the initial setup and ongoing maintenance costs for XR hardware are likely to be greater than for "ordinary" campus computer lab equipment. Between the moments when these words were written and when you read them, the specifications for XR-capable computers are likely to change, so we apologize for not providing recommendations that are more specific.

The second type of space that XR technology requires is a studio. This is not a traditional studio space like those many institutions have created for video production, containing large and expensive pieces of equipment: video camera, teleprompter, lighting rigs, etc. Rather, an XR studio needs to be little more than an empty space, and not very large; a small classroom or even an average-sized office would make a reasonably sized XR studio. Figure 2 shows an XR studio space at Hamilton College that is simply an otherwise empty corner of a larger office suite. Figure 3 shows XR studio space at NCSU consisting of an office cubicle inside a library. It may be desirable for an XR studio to be an interior room to allow lighting levels to be controlled; curtains hung on the walls can reduce echoing, as in a traditional studio. As these figures show, however, that is clearly not a requirement.2 

An XR studio must be a space in which a user can don a VR headset and move around freely while in a simulation, without fear of bumping into other people or expensive hardware or tripping over cords on the floor. Many current VR and AR headsets are tethered to a computer, so a long cable is necessary to give the user maximum freedom of movement; such freedom is critical in an XR studio because a user wearing a headset is blind to the physical world. We have heard stories about users wearing VR headsets getting tangled up in cords and pulling computers off tables to their doom or accidentally punching a monitor. However, solutions to such problems can be surprisingly low-tech: retractable dog leashes have been used to good effect to get cables out of the way.3 Alternatively, an extra-long cable can be attached to the ceiling in the center of the space, so that when a user dons a headset the cable is overhead instead of sideways.

Given the minimalism of the XR studio space, the cost to the institution for setting it up is fairly low, though finding space can itself be one of the most intractable problems in institutions of higher education, where space is often at a premium.

An XR studio space also requires a computer, though this may be tucked in a corner. The computer need not be stationary; it can be a laptop on a cart. A powerful laptop, such as one configured for gaming—or better still, a backpack computer (figure 4)—might be ideal for an XR studio. Such a rig, mobile by definition, may actually be more desirable for some use cases than a dedicated XR studio on campus. A mobile XR rig allows the technology to be deployed anywhere, not just in the studio but also in a classroom, on the quad, off campus, etc. A mobile XR rig may also be packaged as a kit and standardized, which makes it easier to deploy in classrooms, especially for multiple simultaneous users.4 

One last point before leaving the subject of building an XR lab. For an institution of higher education to provide access to XR hardware and software—whether in a lab space or through other means—is a matter of social equity.

EDUCAUSE research has found that only about 4% of students have access to VR or AR headsets, but of those, approximately 72% personally own them.5 These numbers are likely to increase as XR becomes more widely used in education and in society at large. That said, however, 95% of students own a smartphone, and 91% own a laptop. These are very large percentages, nearly saturation.6 But these are the workhorse technologies for student success; let us consider those students who do not own these critical technologies. According to one recent study, 48% of community college students and 41% of students at four-year institutions were food insecure.7 Another study found that 12% and 9%, respectively, were homeless.8 Food insecurity and homelessness obviously aren't the only reasons for not personally owning a smartphone, a laptop, or a VR headset. But institutions of higher education have done a good job of providing access to many technologies on campus through computer labs, and building an XR lab continues this work of pursuing equity. If student success is a priority for an institution of higher education,9 then it needs to actively work to remove structural barriers to students' access to technologies and other campus resources.

Institutions of higher education must provide access to XR and other technology not only for those students who do not own it but also for those who are remote from campus. This is particularly an issue for community colleges and other institutions with a high percentage of commuter students. Many institutions of higher education provide enterprise-licensed software, such as statistical analysis packages and video production tools, to the campus community. As discussed later in this report, however, many vendors do not offer an enterprise license for XR software, so this may not be possible currently, though it is something that institutions of higher education should demand from technology vendors of all stripes.

Many institutions also provide cloud-based applications, such as email and the learning management system (LMS), to the campus community. Cloud-based XR is still in its infancy, though there is some speculation that 5G networks might enable it.10 Once cloud-based XR becomes feasible, it might be the mechanism by which institutions of higher education will be able to provide access to XR for students who are remote from campus. Combining cloud-based XR with the use of inexpensive consumer XR hardware, such as Google Cardboard and a smartphone (which most students already own), or with a technology lending program such as that offered by the NCSU Libraries, would enable an institution to develop simulations of traditional lab spaces, such as chemistry or biology labs, for students remote from campus.