Best Practices for 3D Models?

I donate my DK2 to a local university and the professor there asked me if there are any best practices for modeling and texturing in VR.

Can someone here enlighten me what his students should pay attention to? They want to work on a small VR project now.

Normal maps only work for (very) small details. You either want to increase poly counts or add tessellation. Other than that, its all up in the air. I prefer using 2048 texture maps for most things, though 4096 would be better. Hardware needs to get a bit better before we can start using 4k textures everywhere though, heh.

Other than that, make sure everything is scaled 1:1 as to how it would be in the real world.