HP first announced its Campus of the Future project at the EDUCAUSE 2017 Annual Conference, describing it as an effort "to meet the growing challenges of higher education" and "to improve student success, mitigate risk, increase accessibility, and enhance teaching, learning, and research."1 An important part of the project was, and still is, to introduce immersive computing to institutions of higher education and to conduct research about that technology.

HP approached EDUCAUSE in early 2017, prior to the EDUCAUSE 2017 Annual Conference, about conducting this evaluation, and the following parameters were established: HP would provide the hardware, and EDUCAUSE would provide the methodological expertise to conduct an evaluation research project investigating the potential uses of 3D technologies in higher education learning and research. HP, keenly aware of the risk of sponsorship bias (or even of the perception of bias), gave EDUCAUSE maximum latitude in carrying out this project. While most of the project's technology and technical support for participating institutions was HP-branded, EDUCAUSE distributed this technology to participating institutions and was their primary point of contact. More important, EDUCAUSE developed the methodology for this evaluation and conducted all data collection and analysis independently.

Phase 1 of the project spanned the 2017–18 academic year and culminated in the Learning in Three Dimensions report. Phase 2 of the project spanned an 18-month period from late 2018 to early 2020 and culminated in the XR for Teaching and Learning report in 2019 and this report.

The research question answered in the XR for Teaching and Learning report was:

• What factors influence the effectiveness of XR technologies for achieving various learning goals?

In brief, the answer is fidelity, novelty, ease of use, time-on-task, and a spirit of experimentation. The XR for Teaching and Learning report also identified some challenges to and requirements for integrating XR into teaching. These were the starting points for the current study.

Before XR can be used to achieve any learning goals—before any technology can be used to achieve anything—it has to be adopted for use. But no technology adoption is perfectly smooth; there are always challenges and organizational factors that influence the process. The research question for this project was:

• What factors influence institutional deployment of XR technology?

This study fills out the picture of XR use in higher education. Much of the published research on XR for education consists of studies of single courses or projects in which XR technology was deployed, or meta-analyses that look across these studies.2 The XR for Teaching and Learning report looked at the use of XR tools and technologies by instructors and students within the context of courses and curricula. But most of this prior work focused on the uses of XR for instruction. That is the primary use case for many technologies in higher education, and XR is no exception. But that is not the whole picture. For XR to be used for teaching and learning, it must first exist on campus and, second, have some measure of institutional support. This report focuses on this aspect of XR adoption on campus: How are XR tools and technologies provided to users on campus, what institutional resources are devoted to it, and how is XR technology being systematically integrated into the operations of institutions of higher education. At the same time, part of the purpose of this report is to inform institutions of higher education that have not yet deployed XR technology how they might go about doing so productively. This report, therefore, relies heavily on examples of XR deployment at institutions that participated in this study. Your mileage may vary, as they say, but hopefully all readers will be able to find something in these examples that may apply within their institutional context.

As with any rapidly changing technology and marketplace, XR terminology is highly fluid. See appendix A for a discussion of this terminology.