In the European landscape, virtual reality is no longer just a fascinating technology or a promise for the future. Increasingly, it is becoming a concrete tool for rethinking accessibility, learning, and participation. It is within this broader development that two particularly interesting Erasmus+ projects can be placed: InclusiVRity and VR4Mobility. Although they address different target groups and operate in different contexts, both show how VR can be used not to impress, but to reduce barriers, build more accessible environments, and offer learning experiences that are safer, more adaptable, and more inclusive.
InclusiVRity was created with a very clear objective: to support secondary school teachers in using virtual reality technologies to create more inclusive environments for neurodivergent students. Active from 31 December 2024 to 30 June 2027, the project brings together six European partners and focuses on the development of accessible tools and materials for the educational use of VR. Among its most interesting elements is the creation of a user-friendly platform based on immersive social stories, that is, scenarios that recreate real-life situations and can help students and teachers work on social understanding, participation, self-regulation, and learning in more controlled and predictable contexts. The project also aims to provide teachers with tools to create personalised VR scenarios based on students’ needs.
The results already presented by InclusiVRity move in the same direction. The results page highlights, among the project outputs, a guide designed to help educators integrate VR into their teaching practice, as well as a scientific report documenting the findings emerging from the piloting and implementation phases. This is important because it shows a project that goes beyond technological experimentation and instead seeks to build transferable knowledge, methodological reflection, and practical tools for the everyday work of teaching professionals.
VR4Mobility, by contrast, works in a different field, yet follows a surprisingly similar logic. Coordinated by the Regional Institute Rittmeyer for the Blind in Italy, the project brings together eight partners from seven European countries and focuses on transforming orientation and mobility training through virtual reality. According to information shared by the project and by ICEVI Europe, VR4Mobility explores the potential of VR in orientation and mobility training for blind and visually impaired people, with the goal of developing curricula and tutorials both for end users and for orientation and mobility professionals. In other words, it uses immersive simulation to work on autonomy, movement, safety, and practical skills in a controlled environment.
This is where the parallel with InclusiVRity becomes particularly interesting. At first glance, the two projects seem to belong to very different worlds: on one side, secondary education and neurodivergence; on the other, mobility and the autonomy of blind and visually impaired people. In reality, both start from the same core intuition: virtual reality works best when it is not conceived simply as a technology, but as an accessible pedagogical environment. In both cases, VR is used to simulate real-life situations, reduce risk and overload, allow repetition, increase control over the experience, and create more gradual learning opportunities. This is a strong methodological connection, not a superficial one.
The active collaboration between InclusiVRity and VR4Mobility is therefore valuable precisely because it brings into dialogue two different ways of understanding accessibility. InclusiVRity reminds us that educational inclusion also depends on the possibility of designing experiences that are more sensory-sustainable, more readable, and more personalised for neurodivergent students. VR4Mobility, in turn, shows how VR can strengthen autonomy, orientation, and confidence in contexts related to the body, space, and movement. Taken together, the two projects suggest something very simple, yet very powerful: accessibility should not be approached in isolated compartments. Good practices developed in one field can inspire another, especially when personalisation, safety, agency, and situated learning are at the centre.
There is also another important element that connects the two experiences: the role of professionals. Neither project imagines VR as an automatic or self-sufficient solution. In InclusiVRity, teachers are supported in designing and mediating experiences that are meaningful for their own classrooms. In VR4Mobility, the focus is explicitly linked to the training of orientation and mobility professionals. In both cases, technology has value when it strengthens human expertise, not when it claims to replace it. This is an important perspective, especially today, because it brings educational and rehabilitative design back to the centre instead of relying on a simple enthusiasm for innovation.
For InclusiVRity, looking at VR4Mobility therefore means broadening the field of vision: seeing how virtual reality can be used not only to foster school participation and classroom inclusion, but also to address, in a concrete way, the issue of autonomy in everyday life. For VR4Mobility, dialogue with InclusiVRity opens an equally valuable reflection on the educational potential of immersive social stories, on the importance of personalisation, and on the need to design tools that take into account the different cognitive, sensory, and relational profiles of users. In this sense, the collaboration between the two projects is not only interesting: it is a genuinely European example of how innovation, accessibility, and learning can grow more effectively when they are allowed to inform and enrich one another.