The latest move in an ongoing effort to embed virtual reality (VR) into education, Meta has unveiled a new partnership with a slew of universities in the U.S. and U.K., aimed at giving feedback on a new product that it hopes will finally make VR just a little bit mainstream.

Meta for Education, its new beta program, will see the parent company of Facebook team up with 13 educational institutions to access an early product that it has been teasing for a while now. The company said in a blog post on Monday it wants to "make it easier for educators to discover interactive and engaging content" on subjects like science, medicine, history and language arts.

Just ahead of a proper roll-out, the universities will experiment with VR and mixed reality prototypes in class before releasing them in full scale in the near future. Arizona State University, Houston Community College, Imperial College London, Miami Dade College, Morehouse College, New Mexico State University, San Diego State University, Savannah College of Art & Design, The University of Glasgow, University of Iowa, University of Leeds, University of Miami, and University of Michigan.

Meta announced today that it's expanding its metaversity program, called the "digital twin," to Europe, where it will be offered at the University of Leeds in the U.K. and also across campus at the University of the Basque Country in Spain and the University of Hannover in Germany. That's two years after Meta teamed with a company called VictoryXR to power virtual university programs in the United States-in environments that directly replicate their real-world campus counterparts.

According to Meta, "immersive classes" began the fall semester at the University of Leeds, initially focusing on performance and theater. The University of Basque Country is going to join the next wave, starting classes on the topic of physiotherapy and anatomy in February 2025, while University of Hannover is going to offer immersive classes from the next academic year.

Virtual education
A new education-focused product from Meta, built around its Quest headsets, was teased some seven months ago, featuring a hub for education apps and tools as well as controls enabling administrators to manage multiple headsets centrally. Meta said at the time it'd make the product available to "institutions serving learners aged 13+"; Today's news, however suggests that -- for now at least -- it is focusing on the older learners.

Yet on the other hand, it suggests that Meta is far from abandoning its expensive VR initiatives — Meta's Reality Labs unit, devoted to all things VR and AR, continues to hemorrhage money. Its latest quarterly earnings show it booked revenue 29% higher than last year, at $270 million, but its expenses rose to an overall Q3 loss of $4.4 billion-a figure the company expects to keep growing in further "ongoing product development" and "investments to further scale our ecosystem.".

As Apple throws its hat into the immersive headset ring with the Vision Pro, many feel that this can be what brings mixed reality-including both VR and AR-out of the enthusiast showring and into the mainstream arena.