Theatre Without Walls: Immersive Learning as Living Performance

I recently stepped into the dreamscape of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ at London’s Bridge Theatre. My intention was to introduce Shakespeare to my grandchildren! In this bold staging, the onlookers did not sit quietly in rows in the dark—they stood at the centre of the action. Scenes erupted around us. Fairies flew overhead. Actors emerged from within the audience. The line between performer and observer dissolved. Technology and humans were fully integrated.

This wasn’t just theatre, it was total engagement. While listening, I thought about immersive learning. ‘The Dream’ offered a powerful metaphor for what learning might become in the age of extensive VR, AR, and XR technologies.

Virtual Technologies

XR stands for Extended Reality, which is an umbrella term that includes all forms of immersive technologies that blend the real and virtual worlds. VR (Virtual Reality) is a fully immersive experience where users are placed inside a completely digital environment. AR (Augmented Reality) is where digital elements are overlaid onto the real world, typically via smartphones or AR glasses.
MR (Mixed Reality) is a hybrid of VR and AR where digital and real-world objects can interact in real time.
XR invites us to step beyond the frame of the traditional learning stage. No longer confined to passive observation, learners become co-creators—embodied, active, and situated. Like the Bridge Theatre’s audience, they move, respond, and participate. They are not just watching the play; they are in it! They can experience emotion and the unpredictability of human behaviour.
The future of learning is not about rows of seats, it’s a theatre without walls, where vision, inspiration and participation take centre stage.

Learning as Living Performance

In traditional classrooms, learning often stops at the edge of the page, door or screen; learning materials are ‘delivered’, and students respond. But immersive technologies break the ‘fourth wall.’ Learners engage through multiple senses, respond with movement, and navigate spatially and socially. Just as theatre in the round enables elusive embodied ‘presence,’ so too does immersive learning.

The future of learning is not about rows of seats, a theatre without walls, where vision, inspiration and participation take centre stage.

Scenes from education soon

• Medical students do not just read about surgery, they practise it with colleagues in risk-free, 3D simulations.
• A history class need not read about 16th-century Venice—they wander its alleys, hearing the calls of market vendors and watching the Doge’s parade pass by.
• Store workers do not just receive instructions on managing Black Friday crowds, they actively rehearse realistic scenarios. They learn safely from mistakes.
• A team of engineers step inside the factory processes and redesigns them together, in real time.
• All air crew teams have limited opportunity to rehearse optimum responses to rare emergencies. They can practice dealing with panic in passengers and evacuation of an aircraft as frequently as they wish, with close to photorealism
• Astronauts in training can navigate around their space station and then view the thin layer of the atmosphere around Earth as the sun rises.
  
  
  

Designing the Experience

VR becomes a stage where learners rehearse for real-world challenges. AR acts like a backstage whisper—subtle, informative, and always in context. In both cases, the role of the educator evolves from director to facilitator of experiences.

Of course, not all virtual experiences are created equal. A shallow VR tour or a clunky AR overlay can feel more like bad amateur dramatics than Shakespearean enchantment. Like good theatre, immersive learning needs:

• Purposeful design, goals, plots and playlist. What might learners feel, learn, change?
• Emotional engagement. How are empathy, curiosity, or play involved?
• Agency. What are learners doing, choosing, reflecting?
• Shared presence. Change solo learning into a collective.
  
  

The Next Acts

We are only in Act I of immersive education. But the rehearsal is over. It is time to build stages where learners step in, move freely, create their own lines, and see themselves transformed within the drama.
Act II will bring even more variety, opportunity, and engagement. Just as YouTube and social media have democratized content creation, affording creatives a platform to publish their videos, so advances in AI will unlock XR making educational development easier, cheaper, and not only available to those on big budgets. As headsets improve, so will the user experience, bringing greater realism and immersion while reducing the annoying nausea that affects some in VR.

As for Act III? Who knows! The world is a stage, and we are merely players. Plan your entrances and exits now. The curtain will lift on your performance.

“Are you sure that we are awake? It seems to me that, yet we sleep, we dream.”
— A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act IV, Scene I

…………………………………………………………………

Want to Know More about XR?

If you are inspired to explore XR for your educational context, look out for the Learning Café at OEB25 called ‘From Classroom to Cosmos. XR practitioners Matthew Day, Bart Boelens, Frank Samson, and Frederick Meulen – and others – are keen to share their achievements and challenges with you.

……………………………………………….

Written for OEB Global 2025 by Gilly Salmon and Matthew Day.