At the time of writing, it is not yet clear how much the universities we return to will look like the ones we left. However, the COVID-19 pandemic shake-up has forced a rethink of educational practice, and it is generally accepted there will be change . Indeed, we are already seeing the rise of fully online universities, such as the Open University () or Woolf University (). It is fairly certain that teaching will move away from lecture theatres, with instructors distributing video lectures early and focusing more on in-person interactions with the students (see e.g. Dane and references therein). The activation barrier to flipped teaching has been lowered with the lockdown providing the momentum to overcome it. Sanjay Sarma, the vice president for learning at MIT, which has been making courses available online for free since 2002, has been quoted as saying, "we don't want to waste our proximity on one-way stuff. It has to be two-way learning". This is particularly difficult to deliver especially for remote laboratory teaching, not having been handled particularly well or avoided completely in lockdown, certainly for chemistry "wet" labs but even chemistry "dry" labs come with their own problems. Delivery is very technology-dependent and video-based tuition can lose interaction and engagement. Including interactivity through email, chat, discussion forums and video calls only go part of the way. More sophisticated strategies based on spatial social platforms, such as Gather [43], SpatialChat , and Virtual Reality show promise of effective engagement as found in our recent experiments in hosting virtual workshops . These workshops were a follow-on activity from our Future of Meetings Symposium held last year to explore best practices in remote interactions and focused specifically on delivering engaging workshops to a small, selected audience through the Gather [43] and Glue [50] platforms. The 3D and pseudo-3D interaction format of these platforms, especially when integrated with digital whiteboards, was generally agreed to provide a more engaging learning environment. While the technology is still maturing, we are encouraged and hope the momentum of innovation and development that the pandemic imparted onto the chemical education community continues to push developments in virtual space and will give rise to effective hands-on laboratories even at a distance.