Article by Francesco Berlucchi

According to the 2025 Future of Jobs Report, published in January by the World Economic Forum, around 39% of today’s skills will be transformed or become obsolete by 2030, with a growing demand for technological capabilities. The report forecasts the creation of 170 million new roles globally, with a net increase of 78 million jobs. Many of these professions will require skills that can only be taught through advanced digital tools such as virtual technologies and artificial intelligence.

How can we rise to this educational challenge?
“At Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, the Metaversity project explores the potential of immersive learning, tailored to the needs of both students and faculty,” explains Andrea Gaggioli, Director of the Centre for the Study of Communication Psychology (PsiCom) and Metaversity coordinator, during “Humane Metaverse: The Future Beyond the Hype. Theories, Applications, and Experiences Compared”, an event organized by the university's Humane Technology Lab (HTLab) and Teaching and Learning Lab (TeLeLab) in collaboration with PsiCom. “The goal is to design learning experiences that integrate AI and virtual reality, while remaining accessible and inclusive.”

Metaversity unfolds in three phases.
The user research phase, which began in 2023, involved 12 immersive workshops with over 90 professors from various faculties, and analyzed students’ expectations around virtual worlds.
In Phase 2, starting in 2024, Metalabs were introduced—immersive teaching models based on the user research results. “In other words, these are student- and teacher-centered immersive instructional design experiences hosted on the Spatial.io platform, where faculty and students can meet, communicate, and collaborate in real time using avatars. It opens a ‘third way’ between physical and remote learning,” continues Prof. Gaggioli. “Again, the focus is not the technology itself, but the learning goal—making classes more engaging and effective.”

Over three years of experimentation across 15 courses, the project has involved 590 students, generated over 70 hours of co-designed instruction, two doctoral dissertations, five master's theses, two immersive-credit courses, and three scientific publications. Among the latter, the volume Humane Metaverse. Reflections on Self, Education, Organizations and Society, published by Vita e Pensiero (2024), was presented in September in Tempe, Arizona, at the 27th Annual CyberPsychology, CyberTherapy & Social Networking Conference.

“This book represents the joint reflection of many colleagues at the university on the applications of virtual reality and the Metaverse across various contexts,” says Daniela Villani, Professor of General Psychology at Università Cattolica and coordinator of the Digital Media, Psychology and Well-Being research unit. “It doesn’t offer only a psychological perspective, but also insights from philosophy, sociology, economics, medicine, and communication—clearly addressing the challenges, opportunities, and processes triggered by the Metaverse.”

“The digitalization of learning environments is enabling new and extraordinary opportunities for educational innovation,” comments Giovanni Marseguerra, Director of TeLeLab, during the event moderated by Corriere della Sera journalist Alessia Cruciani. “Università Cattolica has long been studying and experimenting with new technologies—passionately, yet with great care. Experimentation fuels research, and research is essential to guide experimentation. As Fr. Agostino Gemelli, founder of the university, once said: those who live in the past cannot be educators.”

The Metaverse has both industrial and consumer applications.
“One of its main industrial uses is shortening the time between an idea and the ability to test it—accelerating product development and rapid prototyping,” explains Lucio Lamberti, scientific director of the Metaverse Marketing Lab at Politecnico di Milano. “On the consumer side, it enables socialization and access to more immersive, meaningful content.”

So, what’s the Metaverse’s current status?
“To be dead, it’s doing surprisingly well. To be alive, maybe not so great,” jokes Prof. Lamberti. “The term itself has been heavily influenced by media hype. But if we separate the underlying technologies of extended and mixed reality from the concept of interconnected worlds, the Metaverse is more alive than ever. For those interconnected environments, artificial intelligence will be the accelerator of a future-forward phenomenon.”

“We often ask what’s beyond the hype of the Metaverse—but the real question is: what is it for?” asks Giuseppe Riva, Director of HTLab. “One of a psychologist’s core roles is to facilitate change. And change starts with experience. But experience is hard to control. The Metaverse allows just that: it’s a technology that, for the first time, lets us craft experiences that can actually transform us.”
Even inside university classrooms.

The article is published on Secondo Tempo.