http://www.wowway.com/~jstodola/test.html
Well that's what I've accomplished so far. It took me ages, but really my main mistake was trying to get photoshop to do something which it doesn't seem to want to do. I know it has a good panorama stitching program and was trying to get it to stitch together a full 360 degree panorama. But it doesn't seem to understand the concept, it'll make something wider than 360 degrees, it has no obvious mechanism for automatically making a loop point. I would have had to do that manually, and that sounded like a lot of hassle.
But my camera came with a program called Photostitch that handled that task quite easily.
It doesn't look very "virtual", that's because I had a limited vertical field of view. The end result was closer to just panning the image side to side rather than doing the more complicated 3d like scaling. I can improve upon that a certain amount.. first off I can hold the camera in the portrait orientation, the test was shot landscape. I just wasn't thinking about details like that. And yes, it's too dark.. with all the shadow and direct sun I didn't bother trying to find a good exposure.
I've realized a flaw in my method though. I did this outside, in order to minimize the effects of my sloppy method, which was simply hand holding the camera and taking a series of pictures to try to cover the full 360 degrees with some overlap. But shooting the interior of a house on the other hand could require exacting precision, possibly even a specialized tripod mount.
So before I say this is a piece of cake I need to try this indoors. I need to see if things still line up when the lines of sight are much shorter and error should be more obvious.
My ultimate goal of doing the cockpit of a jet would require considerable precision, doing a room is more of an intermediate step.