Immersive tech transforms nursing and cyber education | Architecturally Speaking

If you grew up watching The Magic School Bus, you know the best lessons are the ones you experience firsthand. We may not be shrinking to explore the human body or time-traveling to meet dinosaurs (yet) but the days of “Please open your textbooks” could soon be replaced with, “Step inside – today’s lesson is waiting for you.”

We learn best when we’re not just seeing or listening, but doing – when a lesson grabs our attention, wakes up our senses, and pulls us into the action. The “Cone of Experience,” attributed to Edgar Dale, highlights this simple idea: the more hands-on the experience, the stickier the learning.

For generations, classrooms have struggled to break free from the flatness of chalkboards and slides. Now, with technology shaping the classroom, education is evolving into something far more cinematic — worlds that react to you, concepts you can walk through, and lessons that play out like living, breathing narratives.

Nursing is a fast-paced, high-stakes profession where split-second decisions can change the course of a life. In nursing education, meaningful patient interaction is essential – it’s how students develop true bedside manner, learn to recognize and respond to illness or injury, and build the empathy needed to support patients and families in their most vulnerable moments.

To help students gain these skills safely, nursing programs often rely on volunteer community members known as standardized patients to rehearse common procedures. But because certain scenarios are too risky or complex for live participants, some programs also use high-fidelity mannequins, remotely operated by trained technicians. These lifelike mannequins breathe, speak, register a pulse, and react physiologically to a student’s actions. Placed in a realistic simulated hospital room, they complete a fully staged environment where learners must assess, diagnose, and treat their “patient” in real time.

In one such simulation, I watched two students demonstrate remarkable teamwork, communication, and clinical reasoning as they worked toward diagnosing their plastic patient with sepsis. From my seat in the control booth, I observed them enter the room, wash their hands per protocol, and introduce themselves. The technician, voicing the patient, added tension with increasingly uncooperative and eventually hallucinatory responses, mimicking the progression of severe infection.

Each simulation concludes with either successful stabilization or a failure that can mean losing the patient. The pressure is intense but intentionally mirrors real clinical environments. Afterward, students review video footage with their instructor, breaking down what went well and what could improve. This immediate reflection is invaluable.

Not every healthcare professional works in a hospital. Medical first responders can now interact with simulated mass-casualty scenarios in a room bounded by a continuous screen with seamless projection, able to convey the chaos of such a scene.

These simulated spaces serve as incubators where students can safely build interpersonal skills, clinical judgment, self-efficacy, and confidence in the face of rare or crisis-level situations. Local programs, including those at SUNY Brockport, the University of Rochester and St. John Fisher University have embraced this method of learning.

Cybersecurity is a topic only recently popularized, and is an inherent necessity in the digital age. The Global Cybersecurity Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is a pioneering program that partners with government and industry leaders to “implement solutions and commercialize research.” After in-person visits to professional training facilities, RIT, LaBella Associates and IBM created a partnership to bring this caliber of simulation to an academic setting for the first time.

The state-of-the-art “Cyber Range,” housed within a 50,000 sq. ft. facility, tests students’ wits as well as their ability to remain calm during a cyber-attack. The chamber features an interactive video wall displaying world maps, weather, traffic, flight patterns, social media feeds, stock tickers, and news — all live. During a simulation, inevitably there will be a disruption — Twitter will explode, banks will react, the stock market will spiral, and phones will begin to ring. Colored lights shift from blue to red. The temperature in the room is programmed to rise. The desks, fitted with transducers, vibrate. A white noise machine fills the room with an audible ringing. All of these systems are linked through software to ensure a seamless and completely immersive environmental shift.

The chamber is intentionally unnerving. Despite the anxiety-inducing environment, students must remain on-task, working together to strategize. Information is shared from computer desktops to the communal video wall, while small groups outline their approach on white boards with video capture. As the clock ticks down, the class must locate and neutralize the attack. After the simulation is complete, the room is returned to normalcy. Instructors emerge from their observation booth and review recorded video footage, noting lessons learned.

Nursing and cybersecurity are just two examples of the many disciplines embracing immersive education. Design students can now step directly into their creations through augmented and virtual reality — wandering through architectural models or virtually “trying on” conceptual garments. In aviation, flight simulators have long been essential for pilot training, but AR is now expanding those capabilities by giving flight attendants the chance to rehearse high-risk scenarios in complete safety. Across nearly every field, immersive environments make it possible to explore interactions, procedures, and concepts that are too vast, complex, or intrusive to replicate in real life, from navigating the cosmos to peeling back the layers of the human body.

At Monroe Community College, a classroom configured to look exactly like a convenience store, complete with video surveillance, prepares students studying public safety for shoplifting scenarios. Through authentic, real-world simulations, the traditional learning curve from academia to the workplace can be significantly reduced.

In 1968, audiences watched in awe as a space traveler in 2001: A Space Odyssey placed a video call to his daughter on Earth, a moment that felt as impossible as autonomous cars or reusable rockets. Back then, such technology belonged firmly in the realm of science fiction. Today, it’s in most classrooms.

The pace of technological change is relentless, and education is evolving in step. Students now navigate immersive tools that would have seemed miraculous only a generation ago, and the learning spaces of the future promise to be even more spectacular: virtual worlds to explore, simulations to inhabit, and experiences that blur the line between imagination and reality. The classroom of tomorrow isn’t just arriving — it’s coming to life.

AIA Rochester contributes a quarterly column entitled “Architecturally Speaking,” which features articles from its member architects. Barbara Burke, Associate AIA is a Project Associate at LaBella Associates and Education Director for AIA Rochester. She has nearly 15 years of experience designing higher education and liturgical projects, with areas of focus including campus master planning and space planning. Outside of work, Barbara enjoys travel and champions programs that educate future generations interested in pursuing architecture and related fields.