Expanding Reality: How zSpace and ClassVR Made Me Feel Like a Kid Again

There is a moment at ISTE where the conference stops feeling like professional development and starts feeling like the future arrived early and forgot to send a warning.

For me, that moment happened twice on the main expo floor. Once with my hands around a holographic human heart. Once standing in the trenches of World War One.

Neither of those sentences is a metaphor.

zSpace: When the Screen Reaches Back

Throughout my career, I have seen a lot of technology demos. I have nodded politely at a lot of screens showing me things that were impressive in the booth and impractical in the classroom.

zSpace is not that.

zSpace is an augmented reality monitor, a screen that pushes three-dimensional content out toward you rather than keeping it flat behind the glass. At their booth, I sat down in front of one and was handed a stylus. On the screen in front of me was a human heart, rendered in three dimensions, floating in space.

I reached out and touched it.

Not metaphorically. Not through a controller or a gesture. I reached out with the stylus and I rotated the heart, peeled back layers of muscle, isolated chambers, zoomed into valve structure. The heart responded to what I did with it. It moved the way a real object moves when you handle it: with weight, with dimension, with the satisfying spatial logic of something that exists in three dimensions rather than two.

Then I deconstructed a bionic arm.

I want to be careful here not to oversell the technology at the expense of the pedagogy, because the pedagogical argument for zSpace is more interesting than "the 3D looks cool." The argument is this: there are things that are genuinely, fundamentally difficult to understand from a flat image that become immediately intuitive the moment you can interact with them spatially.

The relationship between the chambers of the heart. The mechanism of a prosthetic joint. The geometry of a molecule. The structure of an architectural model. These are not things that a better diagram fixes. They are things that require spatial reasoning, and spatial reasoning requires space.

zSpace gives students space. Literal, interactive, manipulable space to think in.

🔗 https://zspace.com

ClassVR: My First Time

Going into ISTE 2026, I had never experienced virtual reality.

Not once. Not a consumer headset at a friend's house, not a demo at a previous conference, not a cardboard viewer on a school field trip. I had read about VR in education for years, nodded along to the research, and somehow never put a headset on my face.

It's her fault!

At the ClassVR booth, I put a headset on my face. (This is 100% April's fault, I told her that I trusted her enough to give it a go!)

What happened next is genuinely difficult to describe to someone who has not had the experience, and I suspect that is part of the point.

The first thing I saw was the Western Front in 1917. Not a photograph of it. Not a documentary about it. Not an illustration in a textbook. I was standing in a trench. Mud. Sandbags. The gray sky above a narrow strip of earth. The sounds of what surrounded me. The specific, visceral geography of a place that I had taught about hundreds of times and never, until that moment, had any felt sense of at all.

Then I was standing inside the layers of the earth, watching tectonic plates shift around me, feeling the scale of geological time in a way that no cross-section diagram has ever communicated. Then I was in a rainforest biome, looking up through a canopy, surrounded by the specific light and density of a place that most of my students will never physically visit.

The Montgomery Public Schools principal quoted on ClassVR's website says it better than I can: "I became a child again and said 'our kids need this now.'"

That is exactly what happened to me. I experienced the same sense of wonder as a child again. The thirty years of accumulated professional distance from learning-as-wonder collapsed entirely for about four minutes, and I was just someone experiencing something I had never experienced before and wanting immediately to know more about everything I was seeing.

That is what ClassVR does. It does not replace the teacher. It does not replace the textbook. It creates the felt experience of being somewhere, the World War One trench, the rainforest biome, the geological cross-section, that makes everything the teacher and the textbook say about that place land differently because the student now has somewhere to put it.

ClassVR recently won the King's Award for Enterprise 2026, the UK's most prestigious business award, for innovation and impact in education. Their Eduverse content library contains thousands of curriculum-aligned immersive experiences across subject areas and grade levels, managed through a classroom portal that gives teachers real-time visibility and control over what every student is experiencing.

🔗 https://www.classvr.com/us/

Why I'm Intrigued by Both of These

zSpace and ClassVR are doing different things technically. One augments a screen. One replaces your visual field entirely. But they are making the same pedagogical argument from different directions.

The argument is that some things cannot be fully understood from the outside. Some content requires presence, the felt sense of being inside something, handling something, inhabiting something, to become genuinely comprehensible rather than merely memorized. A student who has stood in a World War One trench in ClassVR does not just know that the trenches were narrow and muddy and defined by a specific geography of survival. They have been there. Not actually. But close enough that the knowledge has a place to live that it did not have before.

That is not a gimmick. That is what learning feels like when it works.

The best part of both experiences? Neither one made me feel like I was in a technology demo. Both made me feel like I was somewhere. And somewhere, it turns out, is exactly where education has always been trying to take us.