The IEL is a new type of teaching space, and a new medium for learning, pioneered at Westminster. Four immersive spaces, industry-leading technology, and the accumulated expertise of over a decade of technology-enhanced education, all focused on one question: what becomes possible when you have the opportunity to not only study something but to experience it?
The IEL is open to everyone in the University.
The Immersive Experience Lab is a new type of teaching space, unlike any other in the UK. Not a lecture theatre with better screens, nor a cinema playing 2D video. It is something entirely new: a spatial computing environment designed from the ground up for immersive learning experiences, and for a new medium for us to invent together.
The IEL continues a long tradition of pioneering new technologies at Westminster. The Lumière brothers in 1896 hosted the first public cinema screening in the UK at our University, introducing a new medium to the world. The IEL is the next chapter of that history: a new medium, pioneered in the same place, by the same institution.
In the IEL, content doesn't sit on a screen in front of you. It surrounds you, a continuous visual field up to thirty metres wide, curving around the room, extending overhead, accompanied by sound that moves through three-dimensional space to complete the immersion. The boundaries between display and room dissolve, the architecture becomes the technology, and the technology the architecture. You are not looking at something. You are somewhere.
That distinction produces a different kind of learning. Being inside a corporate crisis is not the same as reading a case study about one. Navigating a city-scale dataset at thirty metres wide is not the same as analysing it in a spreadsheet. Experiencing the consequences of a design decision within your real estate model is different from viewing them on a screen. The IEL makes the difference between studying something and experiencing it, and that difference, consistently, changes what academics can teach and students can do with what they know.
The IEL provides four bookable immersive spaces, with a further Virtual Production Studio, open to all students and colleagues. All spaces are bookable Monday to Friday, 10:00–13:00 and 14:00–17:00, through the CAT LAB web platform. The Immersive Theatre is prioritised for larger group teaching. The Pods are reconfigurable, combining into larger spaces as needed, with spatial audio adapting automatically.
The IEL is the flagship immersive space of the Creative and Advanced Technologies Lab at the University of Westminster, a Lab that has been building, operating, and refining creative and advanced technology facilities for over a decade. Together they form one of the most sophisticated technology ecosystems available to students anywhere in the UK: digital fabrication, robotics, rapid prototyping, advanced materials testing, visual and audio production, and now this. The IEL did not arrive as a separate project. It arrived as the next chapter of a long story.
Most immersive facilities are built by contractors and maintained by technicians. The IEL was designed, built, and is run by the same team that has been operating the CAT LAB since 2013, the people who have spent over a decade finding out what works for students, what fails, and what makes the difference between a facility that gets used and one that quietly collects dust. That knowledge is not available from a specification sheet. It must accumulate over time and is hard to come by.
The platform that runs the IEL is built on industry-leading media servers combined with in-house software designed and built by the Lab team specifically for the IEL. It exists nowhere else. The team that designed the architecture and technology and built much of the interior fit-out of the IEL, using technologies in the CAT LAB, also runs it. They will be there when you walk in and will be happy to help.
Over a decade of asking what it actually means to learn with advanced technology, what changes when students inhabit a dataset instead of reading it, when they are inside a place instead of being told about it, is embedded in everything about the IEL, from the booking system to the way you upload and access files, to the content creation system we developed for the spaces. The IEL is the most advanced version of a model that has been tested and refined across every technology the Lab has ever introduced.
Getting started is simpler than you might think. Here is the shape of it.
Create your CAT LAB platform account. One registration gives you access to everything: the session builder, the content libraries, booking, and the community. It takes a few minutes and only needs to be done once.
Browse the community library for sessions similar to what you have in mind, or start fresh. Experience walks you through building your first session. If you would rather build it with the Lab team, we are available: get in touch and we will arrange a working session.
Spaces are available Monday to Friday, 10:00–13:00 and 14:00–17:00. Check availability and reserve directly from the platform. The Immersive Theatre is prioritised for larger group teaching, so book early if you are bringing a full cohort.
Before the IEL opens formally, we are running a programme of workshops and supported sessions designed so that colleagues arrive at opening day already familiar with the tools, with content prepared, and with a clear sense of what these spaces can do.
Learn to shoot, edit, and bring your own 360 content into a session, using the Lab’s cameras and the platform.
A guided introduction to Experience: building scenes, uploading content, exploring the library, and preparing for your first session.
The Lab is open before the formal launch for colleagues to come in, see how their content looks on the actual spaces, and refine before teaching begins.
These are starting points, drawn from the first sessions we have run and what changes when students move from reading about something to being inside it. The question to start with is not what content you have. It is what you want your students to experience.
Place your students inside the context before the session begins. A retail environment before a market entry case study. A construction site before the project management module starts. A city before the urban policy seminar. A landscape, a clinical environment, a factory floor. Experienced rather than described, and retained differently because of it.
At thirty metres wide, a single scene can hold what ten conventional slides cannot. Present a financial model where the whole structure is legible at a glance. Review every student’s work simultaneously, with no printing, no queue, no projector. Display a comparative case study where two or three options sit side by side across the full arc of the space.
The IEL is not just a display surface. At its most powerful, it becomes a shared working environment, where the whole group builds something together, spatially, at room scale. A strategy workshop where the competitive landscape, scenario options, and market data are built collaboratively across the wall. A live ideation space for a consultancy challenge or a design brief.
Datasets rendered at room scale change what you can see. Relationships invisible in a spreadsheet become legible when they span thirty metres. Patterns that sustained analysis might never surface become immediate. The understanding you take from standing in front of a dataset that fills your visual field differs from the understanding you build at a screen.
Three-dimensional models at the scale they were designed to inhabit. A building becomes a place. A product becomes an object. A spatial design becomes an environment your group can move through, discuss, and critique together. What was a representation becomes a space.
Every session created in the IEL can be shared across the University community. The library is not maintained by the Lab team, it is built by everyone who uses the platform. Browse what colleagues have made, adapt it for your own teaching, and add what you discover back into the pool. A session that works for one faculty becomes a starting point for another. That compounding is the point.
The web app we built for these spaces, author immersive learning, right through to assessment.
→Get startedRegister, build your first session, and book your space. Simpler than you think.
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