I got pointed in this direction by a friend on dA. With the help of Vue and a neat little piece of software called pano2VR it is quite easy to make nifty looking interactive VR environments in either Flash or Quicktime format.

You can see two examples in my gallery at dA (I don't think Flash can be posted in the gallery here):

A desert planet

A futuristic Cityscape

To prepare these in Vue I have set up the scenes as usual (taking into account a 360 degree viewing angle) and then rendered six cube faces (top, bottom and four sides) by setting the camera to 90 deg. FOV (18mm focal length) and square render area. Four each new face you rotate the camera by 90 degree around the vertical axis (Yaw) an then from the zero position 90 up and 90 down (Pitch). Make sure that automatic exposure correction and natural film response are off (otherwise the exposure might not match). The resulting six images are then imported into a converter (I used pano2VR from Gardengnome Software, a real jewel of a program, free demo available). Here you can edit all the parameters of the VR set and then write out the Flash or Qucktime file. Depending on the orientation you used to get the Up and down renders, you might have to rotate the iamge to get it to match up.

Ciao
TD