About Bruce Wolcott
As Faculty Lead at Bellevue College’s XR Lab, Bruce Wolcott has spent nearly a decade helping faculty and students explore how extended reality (XR) can transform education. With a background in communication studies and media theory, Bruce brings a storyteller’s perspective to immersive technology, focusing on how people use space, design, and interaction to learn in new ways.
“Our role at the XR Lab has really been to acquaint faculty and students with the use of XR technologies for teaching and learning.”
Now entering its eighth year, the XR Lab has become a regional leader in hands-on immersive education, supporting everyone from nursing students and ESL learners to game designers and artists experimenting with virtual storytelling.
Up until recently, it’s been too complex for faculty to build their own virtual worlds. But Zoe is simplifying it to the point where anyone can!
Finding Where XR Fits
When it comes to immersive learning, Bruce emphasizes that VR doesn't fit every course equally, but in the right hands, it can change how students understand and experience their subjects.
At Bellevue College, several programs have emerged as standouts:.
- Nursing: Instructors use VR to simulate patient care scenarios—complete with medical emergencies, family members, and real-time coaching.
- Music Performance: A new project uses VR to help guitar students overcome stage fright, performing in front of a virtual audience that coughs, talks, and checks their phones.
- ESL and Communication Studies: VR gives language learners a space to discuss complex technical topics—like artificial intelligence or immersive media—in English.
- Interior Design: Students take 2D blueprints and bring them into virtual environments, walking through rooms they designed to assess lighting, scale, and flow
“You can see where the light is falling in the room. You can see where the furniture might be placed. You get a better spatial sense than you ever could on a flat screen.”
These examples reflect a broader philosophy that runs through Bruce’s work: XR isn’t a replacement for traditional learning. It’s a new layer of experience that allows students to test, build, and apply what they know in dynamic environments.
Bringing Concepts to Life with Zoe
When Bruce joined the Zoe Creator Program, he wanted to design an interactive lesson that merged his love of communication theory with immersive design. The result was a virtual environment based on Richard Saul Wurman’s “LATCH” model, a framework for organizing complex information by Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, and Hierarchy.
Inside his Zoe experience, users could explore each principle hands-on:
- For Hierarchy, Bruce placed three virtual buildings of different heights that learners could manipulate to understand visual order.
- For Location, he added a massive interactive globe, allowing users to reveal cities across North America and Mexico.
- Each section rewarded successful interaction with small touches like confetti bursts, turning abstract theory into tactile discovery.
“The thing that makes it work is that it embodies the concepts. You experience what each of those ideas means in a direct, interactive way.”
By focusing on interaction instead of text, Bruce made Wurman’s framework experiential rather than academic, an approach that mirrors his broader belief that XR is about doing, not just seeing.
Why Build Your Own Experiences
Bruce believes there’s a deep value in educators being able to create their own immersive lessons, rather than relying on pre-built templates. Tools like Zoe make that possible.
“Up until recently, it’s been too complex for faculty to build their own virtual worlds. But Zoe is simplifying it to the point where anyone can.”
He’s seen that value firsthand through projects at Bellevue, where students in anatomy and physiology courses have sculpted physical models of organs—hearts, lungs, and livers—then 3D scanned and imported them into virtual environments.
The process, he says, reinforces learning in powerful ways. “Building something by hand and then walking around it in VR…that’s the way we’re built to learn,” Bruce explains. “It’s how our brains naturally process space, perspective, and interaction.”
You need an act of administrative courage to take a chance on it. When we started, we didn’t have any use cases. We had to make the case from the ground up.
Getting Started with XR in Education
After years of helping others set up labs, Bruce knows that the hardest part of integrating immersive learning isn’t technical, it’s institutional.
His advice for new educators and administrators looking to adopt XR:
- Start small. Bellevue began with just two headsets and a single shared space.
- Find your champions. Passionate faculty and curious students can turn small wins into momentum.
- Build incrementally. Growth takes time; let projects evolve naturally.
- Make it interdisciplinary. Housing the XR Lab in the library gave every department access, not just one program.
- Show value early. Demonstrating even one strong use case can help secure ongoing support and funding.
Today, the Bellevue College XR Lab includes a large classroom, dedicated studio space, and a growing network of partners supported by a National Science Foundation grant. But, as Bruce emphasizes, “It didn’t happen overnight.”
Looking Ahead
As the XR Lab continues to grow, Bruce and his team are exploring the intersection of AI and immersive technology, what he calls the “fusion” of creativity, data, and collaboration.
“The ability to be in a virtual space, to problem-solve and build together…that’s the future of immersive learning.”
From virtual patient care and design visualization to collaborative storytelling and AI-enhanced environments, Bruce’s work represents a bridge between technology and humanity—between the virtual and the real.
Start Creating with Zoe
Zoe helps educators like Bruce Wolcott bring their immersive ideas to life, without coding or complex development. Whether you’re an instructor, technologist, or creative, Zoe provides a simple way to build, test, and teach inside VR.
Visit www.zoeimmersive.com to start creating for free, or join the next Zoe Creator Program to learn how educators around the world are shaping the future of learning through immersive technology.
