Physical Vs. Virtual Campus Expansion

There's good reason to account for virtual reality and artificial intelligence when planning campus expansion in the months and years ahead. Soon we'll have virtual lecture halls and labs with AI assistants and tutors, places for learning everything from math and geometry to physics and chemistry, art and music, where teachers and students interact without physical boundaries or infrastructure.

Today's technology and social media giants spend billions of dollars developing virtual reality platforms universities can use right now to create VR teaching and learning environments. It's safe to assume these same companies experiment with virtual reality education methods and tools while preparing commercial VR learning labs and concept simulators of their own.

If you're Amazon, Apple, or Google, remaking education for profit with virtual reality and artificial intelligence is good business. The immediate applications of AI extend well beyond classroom automation. There's intense interest in automating white-collar, institutional administrative tasks. That's the exceptionally ripe, low-hanging fruit for artificial intelligence R&D at the moment. The changes instructional VR and administrative AI portend have far-reaching implications for campus planning, infrastructure, and expansion.