Montclair State University opened a 2,450-square-foot Dreamscape Learn virtual reality facility inside its College of Communication and Media building on 1 September 2026, in space converted from the university's L. Howard Fox Studio Theatre. The room pairs a 26-seat immersive classroom with a free-roam pod that lets students walk physically through a virtual world, using 360-degree motion capture, wrist and foot sensors, and haptics that simulate touch through vibration and other motion. The opening was attended by Dreamscape Learn co-founder and chairman Walter Parkes, chief executive Josh Reibel, New Jersey Secretary of Higher Education Margo Chaly and state Senator Kristin M. Corrado.
The facility launches with Dreamscape Learn's signature course, "Biology in the Alien Zoo", in which student teams run missions in an alien ecosystem, conducting virtual fieldwork, collecting and analysing data, and applying scientific concepts to save a species from extinction. Montclair plans to widen the course catalogue over time so students across majors use the room, and the College of Communication and Media intends to train students as immersive content creators for New Jersey's film and digital media industry.
Outfitting and construction cost about $2.96 million, the university said. Roughly $1 million came from the New Jersey Economic Development Authority's New Jersey Film Works Grant Program, a $3 million workforce-development fund approved in March 2025 under which the agency signed a memorandum of understanding with Montclair State, and $500,000 came from Dreamscape Learn. The university covered the remaining cost and will pay $560,000 in licensing fees in the first year. An earlier $1 million Lilly Endowment grant, awarded through Wake Forest University for Montclair's SEEDS general-education curriculum, was tied to the VR project when the theatre conversion was announced in 2024.
The facility serves a student body of more than 24,000 and makes Montclair the seventh university to run a Dreamscape Learn room, joining Arizona State University, Rowan University and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Arizona State, which opened the first Dreamscape Learn lab in 2021, reports that students in its Dreamscape Learn biology labs are nearly twice as likely to earn an A on lab assignments as those in conventional sections.
