THE EXERCISE: Students should first read the situation in the introduction to the activity. In a class/lab setting, an instructor might want to have students quickly discuss the situation in small groups before proceeding. When the situation is clear, students should click on the photo to enter my apartment. That will launch an audio file which includes the idiom "on the rocks", the lexical focus for this exercise.

Without further prompting, students should explore my apartment by clicking on the panoramic photo. There, they receive additional instructions regarding how to navigate the QTVR movie. The QTVR movie is only 100K in size and should take about a minute to download on a normal 56K modem connection.

In addition to finding the "rocks" in the freezer, students should probably be encouraged to find and read about all the "hidden messages" that they can. The hidden messages (10 in all) could provide a good basis for further class discussion, as might the cutting edge technologies employed. Instructors might also ask students to respond to a series of questions about the exercise by email. The possibilities are endless.

Click the photo below to begin.

THE TECHNOLOGIES: This activity makes use of Apple's QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) technology to place students in a gamelike, 360° immersive environment which they can explore interactively. It also uses streaming audio in MP3 format.

NOTE: QuickTime 4 is needed to view this material. This is freely available for Windows and Macintosh (and other) computers.