Since 1991 Virtual Reality has been used in student projects in the Building Information Technology group. It started as an experimental tool to assess the impact of VR technology in design, using the environment of the associated Calibre Institute. The technology was further developed in Calibre to become an important presentation tool for assessing design variants and final design solutions. However, it was only sporadically used in student projects. A major shift occurred in 1997 with a number of student projects in which various computer technologies including VR were used in the whole of the design process. In 1998, the new Design Systems group started a design studio with the explicit aim to integrate VR in the whole design process. The teaching effort was combined with the research program that investigates VR as a design support environment. This has lead to increasing number of innovative student projects. The paper describes the context and history of VR in Eindhoven and presents the current set-up of the studio. It discusses the impact of the technology on the design process and outlines pedagogical issues in the studio work.