“When VR Was New”: Looking Back at Undergraduate Students’ Initial Encounters with Virtual Reality in an Academic Library

With the release of commercially available virtual reality (VR) headsets in 2016, an increasing number of libraries and educational institutions in the United States adopted these technologies to enhance teaching and research. This article retrospectively analyzes interviews with undergraduate students about their initial experiences with VR technologies in an academic library context in 2017 to understand this period of initial adoption. By comparing this data to recent research findings on educational VR, the study produces insights into the changing ways that students engage with VR as it becomes more commonly used in higher education in the US context. This article adopts a phenomenological perspective to understand students’ experiences and how they made sense of this new media technology to integrate it into their learning. Findings suggest that VR is more common but remains a novel technology for some students and must be implemented by trained staff to ensure its success as a learning tool that enhances student engagement.