In March of 1999, students and staff from Santa Clara Day School of the Pueblo of Santa Clara, came to New York City to begin the creation of the virtual tour. A QuickTime Virtual Reality studio was set up at the museum, and students recorded virtual objects of items they had selected from the exhibition catalogs, recorded virtual panoramic spaces in the exhibition halls, and researched their artifacts for their accompanying essays in the museum's resource center library.

In June of 1999, students and staff from Nah Tah Wahsh PSA, a Hannahville Potawatomi school in Michigan, came to the museum to add to the work done by the Santa Clara students.

Since the initial recording and research by the students, Four Directions and NMAI staff have been assembling the current Virtual Tour with input from the schools. The schools have begun their local virtual museums, using the new skills they have acquired in the virtual tour experience.

In Febuary 2000, the first version of the Four Directions/NMAI Virtual Tour was published to the NMAI web server. The project was considered to be important by both the Four Directions project and NMAI staff. Both institutions wished to continue developing the Virtual Tour. So in May 2000, a third Four Directions school, Marty Indian School, a Lakota school in South Dakota, sent a team to the George Gustav Heye Center to create additional material for the tour. This material has been added to the current version of the tour which you see here.

Since the Marty Indian School contribution to the Virtual Tour, one of the exhibitions featured in the tour, Creation's Journey, has been dismantled and replaced with a new permanent exhibition. The NMAI Virtual Tour now serves as an important record of that exhibition.

Next --->