Initially, each group member should be assigned a key role as a writer, director, producer, researcher or photographer. The instructor's role would be that of the Project Manager; he or she can oversee the entire process

Once roles have been assigned, team members should share ideas regarding what their project should be about. The tour does not necessarily need to be about the place itself. For example, a group might film a nearby cave, but the emphasis of the project might be on how caves form or the importance of preserving cave environments.

After the group has decided upon a general topic and location, it's time to lay out - from start to finish - the nodes of your virtual reality tour, or the stops along the virtual reality journey. This plan allows the group to gather everyone's ideas and incorporate them into a logical format, determine where and how things like graphics, animation, text, and voiceovers will be included in the presentation, identify areas that need to be developed, list the tools needed to present the information, and organize the overall content.

After planning the Virtual Experience, it is time to collect, or capture, the images and multimedia materials to author the experience.

Students will actually need to visit their designated locations and photograph them with the special fisheye-lens-equipped digital camera or build their virtual environments in a 3D authoring tools such as Alias WaveFront or Maya. Each location should be completely captured from Immersive panoramas to still detail images and environmmenta sounds.

For example, when creating a tour of an Historic Home, perhaps a portrait on the wall above the fire place has a story of its own to tell. Shooting a still close-up image of the painting will allow the students to build upon and incorporate into the tour for all to see the story behind the historic portrait.

In addition to media gathered with the capture equipment, a library of images are provided to facilitate this process. Hundreds of images are provided with the VRDL, and there is an extensive ollection of sounds, music and effects to bring the visual richness to life.