Join the community that's building the next era of XR research.
Who you're joining
Founding membership is researchers, founders, and marketers in equal measure. The cross-pollination is the point.
Researchers and academics
PhDs and postdocs from XR labs working on presence, embodiment, social VR, training transfer, and immersive learning. Authors of the papers the field cites in its foundational reading lists. In-house research scientists at headset and content companies.Founders and operators
Builders of XR companies, studios, and platforms across Europe and globally. People scaling immersive products inside Quest, Vision Pro, Snap Spectacles, WebXR, and proprietary stacks. The operators who need defensible benchmarks before a board meeting, a funding round, or a cluster pitch.Marketers and strategists
In-house insights teams at brands testing immersive media. Growth and CX leads running headset campaigns. Strategy consultants advising XR-curious enterprise clients. People who need measurement instruments that weren't retrofitted from screens.
What changes when you're inside.
- You skim five XR newsletters a week and still feel behind.
- You quote a hardware adoption figure, then hope nobody asks where it came from.
- You measure VR engagement with a 2014 marketing scale that wasn't built for headsets.
- You read what an analyst tweeted. You guess if it holds up.
- You meet other XR practitioners in a Discord at 2am or at a conference once a year.
- Your cluster's mapping project starts from scratch every two years.
- You pay €400 for a single trend report from a consultancy you've never met.
Without the community
- One weekly brief. The papers that actually matter, summarised in five minutes.
- Every dataset sourced, versioned, methodology-stamped. The members helped curate it.
- You drop in a validated XR scale — adapted from the literature, tested by members in the field.
- You read what an editor reviewed, and you can ask the author in the members thread.
- You're in a working room. Monthly salons, a searchable registry, an ask-a-researcher channel.
- You contribute to and draw from a shared, continuously updated knowledge base across regions.
Inside the community
Why founding membership exists.
XR Institute opens to its founding community in the coming weeks. We're welcoming 500 researchers, founders, and marketers in before the public launch. Founding members stay free, permanently. After we open publicly, membership becomes paid — but anyone in the founding 250 is grandfathered, free, forever.
Founding members aren't customers. They're the people who decide what the Knowledge Base becomes — which datasets we prioritise, which marketing scales we validate next, which research we surface first, which regional ecosystems we map first.
We'd rather build a community that earns the platform than sell access to one we built alone.
Join the founding communityBefore you join.
Is founding membership actually free?
Yes. Free permanently for the founding 250. No card. No trial clock. No upsell. Once we open publicly, membership becomes paid — but founding members are grandfathered, free, forever.
Why a community, not a customer base?
Because we’re not selling a finished product. Founding members shape what the Knowledge Base publishes, which datasets we build, which marketing scales we validate next, which regional ecosystems we map first. We want the people who’ll use the work to help decide what gets made.
How do you decide who's in?
Founding membership is curated for fit, not first-come-first-served. We’re looking for researchers, founders, and marketers actively working in or adjacent to XR. If your application doesn’t fit yet, we’ll tell you and keep your details for the public launch.
When do I get access?
We’re onboarding in waves over the coming weeks. You’ll get an email the moment your seat is live. Earlier applications get earlier access.
Who's already in?
Researchers from XR labs across Europe and beyond, in-house insights teams at brands testing immersive media, founders of XR companies, marketers running headset campaigns, and a small number of investors and journalists. Affiliations are private; the room itself is not.
What's the editorial standard?
Every artefact passes through both AI sourcing and a named human editor before publication. Methodology is published. Bylines are named. Nothing runs anonymously and nothing runs without disclosure. That’s what vetted means here.
How does XR Institute relate to my cluster, my agency, or my Horizon project?
We’re neutral to all of them. XR Institute sits above national and regional XR organisations — we don’t compete with them, we sit above them as the shared layer they can all draw from. Cluster organisations, regional agencies, universities, and public bodies join through our Partners track rather than founding membership.
What's the "fourth helix"? Why do you keep saying that?
The Triple Helix model of innovation (Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff, 1995) describes how academia, industry, and public bodies co-produce innovation. The Quadruple Helix model (Carayannis & Campbell, 2009) added a fourth side: the community of practitioners, users, and civil society whose adoption and feedback decides whether innovations actually land. EU innovation policy now uses Quadruple Helix as standard. XR Institute is being built to make that fourth helix structural and accountable — and the founding community is the fourth helix in formation. If that’s too abstract: you’re joining the part of XR innovation that academia, industry, and government all need but none of them owns.
Will you spam me?
No. Until access goes live, you’ll get one short monthly briefing on what we’re building and what founding members are asking for. That’s it. Unsubscribe with one click.
Can I leave later?
One click, anytime. Joining costs you nothing and locks you into nothing.