Building and Delivering a Virtual Field Trip

A virtual field trip is not one feature in VRGS — it is four, and the guides for each cover their own tool in depth. This page is the connective one: what to build, in what order, and how the pieces hand off to each other.

Piece	What it contributes	Guide
The model and its interpretation	The outcrop itself, and what you want people to see on it	Basic Interpretation
A field guide	The written material — pages, images, and links that move the reader's view	Field Guide Editor
A flight path	The narrated fly-through that carries an audience between localities	Flight Paths
A multiuser session	Live delivery, with voice, video and shared control	Multiuser Collaboration

You do not need all four. A guide on its own is a self-paced resource; a flight path on its own is a lecture aid; the combination is a field trip.

Decide what kind of trip it is

The answer changes what you build, so settle it first.

Kind	Build	Delivery
Self-paced — students work through it alone	Field guide, with VRGS links on every page	Share the project; no session needed
Presented — you narrate to an audience	Flight path with narration and scenes	Play it, or record it to a movie
Led live — you take a group round together	Field guide and flight path	Multiuser session, you as leader
Distributed as video	Flight path with narration	Record and hand out the file

1. Prepare the model

Everything downstream depends on the model being pleasant to move around in. A trip that stutters between localities is a bad trip regardless of the content.

• Clean and size the model — Preparing a Model.
• If it is large, generate LOD or convert to tiles before you start capturing viewpoints — Working with Large Models. Doing it afterwards is fine, but the viewpoints you captured will have been framed against a different-looking model.
• Get the coordinate system right now — Coordinate Systems. Moving a model later leaves every viewpoint, annotation and guide link behind.

2. Interpret what the trip is about

A field trip needs something to look at. Whatever the subject — bedding orientations, a fault, a facies scheme, a measured section — make the interpretation first, because the guide pages and the flight path will both point at it.

Two things are specifically worth doing at this stage:

• Name your objects properly. A guide link to "Polyline 47" is useless; one to "Base of Unit 3" explains itself.
• Build the scenes you want people to see. A scene records which objects are switched on. Flight paths choreograph visibility through scenes, so a scene per locality — model plus the interpretation relevant there — is the unit of work. See Scenes: visibility choreography.

3. Write the guide

The Field Guide Editor is where the words live. A guide is a set of pages with a navigation structure, written in a rich-text editor inside VRGS.

The feature that makes it a virtual guide rather than a PDF is VRGS links: a link in the text that moves the 3D view when the reader clicks it. Write the guide so that every locality, every feature you name, and every measurement you quote is a link the reader can follow.

Also available on a page:

• The map block — an inset map showing where the reader is.
• Images and video embedded in the page.
• Shared menu bars so a multi-page guide navigates consistently.

Write the guide against the scenes

If you built a scene per locality in step 2, the guide almost writes itself: one page per scene, each opening with a link that puts the reader in the right place looking at the right things.

4. Build the fly-through

A flight path is the guided version — the camera moves for the audience rather than the audience moving the camera.

The sequence is:

1. Capture viewpoints at each locality. These are keyframes; VRGS interpolates a smooth camera path between them.
2. Attach scenes so the right objects appear at the right moment.
3. Fine-tune the timing on the timeline editor — a path that arrives at a feature and immediately leaves gives the audience no time to look.
4. Record narration onto the timeline. Clips show a waveform, so you can align the start of a phrase with a keyframe by eye.

Narration, guided tours and pause-and-look-around are Vulkan-only. If you are authoring a guided tour, run the Vulkan renderer — see Why is this greyed out?.

Stops let the audience catch up

A guided tour can include stops where the camera waits and the audience looks around freely. Use them at the localities that matter. Note that stops are ignored during movie export — a narrated tour with stops is best watched live.

5. Put media in the scene

Field trips benefit from things that are not the outcrop: a photograph of the same bed elsewhere, a core shot, a video of a modern analogue.

• Billboards carry still images placed in 3D space.
• For video and audio in the scene, import the file to Photographs — the group accepts .mp4, .avi and .mov as well as still formats — and attach it to a billboard. See Video and audio in the scene.
• Labels and text annotations name what people are looking at without needing the guide open.

6. Deliver it

Self-paced

Share the project. Readers open the guide and work through it, following the VRGS links. Nothing else is needed.

Live, to a group

Host a multiuser session. Participants join, see each other's avatars, and follow you around the model.

What the session adds beyond a screen share:

• Everyone has their own view. People can look at what interests them and then snap back to yours.
• Voice chat for discussion.
• Video — the camera tile so people can see who is talking.
• Roles and permissions — leader, teaching assistant, participant — so you control who can move what.
• Record and replay, so the session itself becomes a resource.

Play the flight path during the session to move everyone together, then release them to explore.

As a video

Record the flight path to a movie. Recording runs against the project frame rate, so timing and narration hold on any machine — see Recording a movie.

As a document

The Report View builds figures, tables and text into a document you can export to PDF — the handout that goes with the trip. It uses the same editor as the field guide but is a separate thing: a report is a static document, a guide is an interactive companion to the live model.

A realistic order of work

1. Clean and size the model; set the coordinate system.
2. Interpret, naming objects as you go.
3. Capture a scene per locality.
4. Capture viewpoints along the route; check the path plays sensibly.
5. Write the guide pages, one per locality, each linking to its scene.
6. Record narration onto the flight path last — it is the thing you will most want to re-record, and re-recording is cheap.
7. Add billboards, video and labels.
8. Rehearse the whole thing once, at the size of audience you expect.

Rehearse on the delivery machine

A path that plays smoothly on a workstation may not on a laptop, and a multiuser session adds its own load. Rehearse where you will present.

Tips and troubleshooting

• The camera arrives before the model does. Meshes and point clouds are streamed; a path that touches large data preloads it before the camera moves, which is why playback can pause at the start. Load into memory first for a live presentation.
• Guide links go somewhere unexpected. The object moved, or the model was reprojected after the link was made. Re-capture the link.
• A scene shows the wrong things. Scenes captured before version 3.4 do not control meshes and point clouds until re-captured — right-click the scene → Update.
• Narration drifts out of step. It should not: playback runs to the project frame rate. If it does, the project frame rate was changed after the narration was placed.
• Participants cannot join. Check roles and admission in Multiuser Collaboration.

See also

• Field Guide Editor — writing the guide.
• Flight Paths — the fly-through in full.
• Multiuser Collaboration — live delivery.
• Report View — the handout.
• Figures and Images — stills for the guide and report.