XR, VR & AR News
The latest developments in virtual reality, augmented reality and extended reality — with a focus on what matters for education and schools.
ClassVR Wins the King's Award for Enterprise — The UK's Most Prestigious Business Honour
Avantis Education, creators of ClassVR, have been honoured with a King's Award for Enterprise for Innovation — the UK's most prestigious business accolade. They are one of only 185 organisations nationally to receive the award in 2026, selected specifically in the Innovation category.
Assessors highlighted ClassVR's classroom management and safeguarding features as central to the recognition, alongside its centralised teacher portal for real-time session control, the Eduverse curriculum content library, and its support for students with special educational needs through virtual safe spaces and sensory simulations. Since 2017, ClassVR has been adopted by more than 2 million students across 90+ countries, with purpose-built hardware designed for shared classroom use and a content library mapped to curriculum standards across multiple countries.
ClassVR is also showcasing a new "Family Picnic" explorable scene this month — a social and emotional learning experience designed to prompt student reflection on what family means to them, with applications in PSHE lessons.
Source: ClassVR Blog · Education Today · Installation Magazine
Meta Quest v2.4 Rolls Out — App Folders, Controller-Free Navigation & Improved Hand Tracking
Meta's Horizon OS v2.4 update is rolling out to all Quest headsets this week, bringing several improvements that are directly useful for schools managing shared devices.
App folders and custom sorting — long-press any app in your Library to create folders and reorder your app list. For schools with multiple educational apps installed, this means Science, PE, Maths and Wellbeing apps can each have their own folder, cutting navigation time at the start of every session and reducing the chance of students opening the wrong app.
Controller-free locomotion in the home environment — tap thumb against index finger to bring up the teleport arc, point and tap to move, swipe left or right to turn. Useful for accessibility and for sessions where controllers are charging.
Improved hand tracking precision — more accurate finger-level gesture detection, making hand-only interaction more reliable in educational VR apps that use hand interaction for virtual object manipulation and lab simulations.
Automatic session restore — if an app closes unexpectedly, it automatically reopens in the same state, reducing lesson disruption caused by crashes mid-session.
Light/dark theme switching and improved passthrough roaming (move further from your starting position without interruptions) round out the classroom-relevant additions.
North Dakota Expands Free VR Career Exploration to Every School in the State — Including Elementary
North Dakota has expanded its statewide VR career exploration programme to every K-12 school in the state — including elementary schools — after the state legislature passed funding to extend the existing middle and high school programme downward. The platform, CareerViewXR, is now available free of charge to all students across 300+ public and private schools, with a donated VR headset in every middle and high school in North Dakota.
The platform offers 118 immersive career modules — 360-degree "career journeys" that place students inside real job environments across healthcare, construction, skilled trades, agriculture, engineering, public safety and more. Students can experience being a veterinary technician, a manufacturing engineer, a nurse in an operating room, or a welder on a construction site — without leaving their classroom. Crucially, the content works on any device with a browser as well as VR headsets, so students without access to a headset are not excluded.
The initiative is a public/private partnership — what the state has contributed, private businesses have matched, with CareerViewXR also providing an in-kind match. CareerViewXR was awarded the 2026 XRA Limitless Future Award for Leadership in Immersive Technology at the XR Association's annual meeting in Washington D.C. in March. The programme has now expanded to Kentucky, Texas, Maine and Minnesota alongside its flagship state.
Source: EdSurge — 20 May 2026 · GovTech
Walkabout Mini Golf Reaches 40 Courses with Blokhaven — A Toy Town Built by Shipwrecked Blocks
Mighty Coconut released Blokhaven on 7 May — the 40th course for Walkabout Mini Golf and the third new course in 2026 after Tiki à Coco (January) and Passport Hollywood (March). The premise: a freight ship carrying brightly coloured wooden blocks has capsized nearby. The blocks have come to life, organised themselves, and built a seaside island town they've named Blokhaven — populated with animated block-people baking bread, fishing, and operating heavy machinery to continue construction.
Reviewers have called it "the most animated course ever" (UploadVR) and "a revelation" (Gaming Nexus) — one reviewer noted spending more time exploring the environment than actually playing the golf. The Foxhunt treasure hunt mechanic in Blokhaven was praised as one of the most inventive in the game's history. Blokhaven costs $4.99. Players who now own every DLC course have access to 1,440 holes of mini golf in total.
Mighty Coconut CEO Lucas Martell confirmed at GDC 2026 that all 2026 and 2027 courses are fully planned and 2028 planning is underway. The base game (14 included courses) is $24.99 and is available on Quest+, Metahorizon+ and across five VR platforms. Read our full Walkabout Mini Golf review →
Source: UploadVR · Gaming Nexus
VR Mental Health for Schools: Arche XR & T-Mobile Partnership Scales Evidence-Based SEL to More Districts
Arche XR — a VCU-born startup developing evidence-based VR interventions for youth mental health — has partnered with T-Mobile for Education to scale its programmes into more school districts nationwide. The partnership, announced in January 2026, is gaining traction throughout the spring as pilot school districts come on board.
Arche XR's flagship programme, Impact VR, delivers brief self-guided VR experiences targeting social-emotional learning, emotion regulation, empathy, anxiety, bullying prevention and resilience. Peer-reviewed research published in Prevention Science shows significant improvements in mental health outcomes for students including those with ADHD, Autism and Conduct Disorder. A separate $3 million federal grant is funding a large study on how VR can prevent violence among high-risk youth.
T-Mobile provides high-speed 5G connectivity and infrastructure to bring the technology into schools, including districts in rural or low-connectivity areas. Crucially, Arche XR's programmes also work offline, making them deployable even where connectivity is unreliable. The cost is approximately $4 per student — a fraction of traditional mental health staffing costs — and requires no clinical licensure to administer.
A joint white paper from Arche XR and T-Mobile, published in 2026, outlines how VR can expand school mental health provision without adding staff burden, aligning with the US Department of Education's seven strategic recommendations for SEL. Over a dozen localities and school districts have signed up to use the programme so far.
🗓️ This Month in Brief
🏫 School Tip of the Month
Set up app folders now. The v2.4 update's folder system is the most useful classroom management improvement Quest has shipped this year. Before your next session, long-press any app and create subject folders — Science, PE, Maths, Wellbeing, Games — so students arrive at a tidy, organised library rather than scrolling through everything.
Takes 5 minutes per headset. No device management software required.