Admissions offices are competing for students who have never known a world without a screen in their hand, and who decide within seconds whether a piece of outreach is worth their time. Extended Reality (XR) has become one of the few tools that reliably holds that attention long enough to say something meaningful about a campus.
What changed in 2026 is not the technology itself but how easily it deploys. A single 3D model of your quad can now be published as a browser-based virtual tour, launched in AR from a QR code on an acceptance mailer, and projected on a holographic display at a college fair. One asset, several channels, no separate production budget for each. For a recruitment team working against a fixed calendar and a fixed spend, that shift matters more than any individual headset or platform.