Techniques for creating interactive walkthroughs or visualizations of
real-world environments. Such environments for which interactive
walkthroughs may be created may comprise large interior spaces (e.g.,
buildings), wherein a space may comprise multiple rooms. The interactive
walkthroughs may be photorealistic and rendered from arbitrary viewpoints
at interactive rates. In one aspect of the invention, a technique for
generating a visualization representative of an environment comprises the
following steps. A dense set of image data is captured from the
environment. The captured image data is compressed for storage. A portion
of the compressed image data may then be decompressed so as to render a
visualization representative of the environment from a selected novel
viewpoint. Another portion of the image data may be prefetched and
decompressed such that captured image data surrounding the selected novel
viewpoint is available to be rendered. The visualization of the
environment may then be rendered from the selected novel viewpoint.