http://www.intel.com/research/mrl/research/lfm/
looks interesting..
"Light field mapping is a method for efficient
representation and interactive visualization
of surface light fields. This method approximates
the radiance data by partitioning it over
elementary surface primitives and decomposing
each part into a small set of lower-dimensional
discrete functions. The resulting light field
represenation is compact and can be directly
used for hardware-accelerated rendering that
accurately conveys the physical realism of the
original data at interactive frame rates on a
personal computer. Additionally, our representation
can be further compressed using standard image
compression techniques leading to extremely compact
data sets that are up to four orders of magnitude
smaller than the uncompressed light field data. We
demonstrate the approximations for a variety of
non-trivial synthetic scenes and physical objects
scanned through 3D photography."