I am now retired but still writing and creating interactive ebooks about my life's work. My Fellowship was about creating virtual environments for education and training. When I undertook this in 1999, the new technologies on the horizon were virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR). These have since become mainstream – but not as much as I had hoped. There has been – still – a resistance to their use, despite improvements in technology. Academia especially has been very slow and reluctant to use them to improve teaching.

However, one positive side effect of the Covid-19 pandemic has been that academia has had to re-think its approach to teaching and learning. Sadly, this has been patchy and often ill thought out. Thus, a useful follow-up to my 1999 research could be made to investigate this resistance to change regarding the use of new technologies, and whether this is related to the training of educators themselves or to other factors. In my opinion we need to be able to get the best possible mix of face-to-face learning and that offered by the huge potential of these digital technologies. I believe that in this way we could achieve higher levels of global education cost effectively.