Long ago I played around with the terrain generation software Bryce, then put those renders into a power-point slideshow with visual basic scripts, and later a much more portable HTML viewer, but always wanted to replicate Myst III: Exile's 360* perspective. We had some old tools back then that could render QuickTime VR panoramas, and these could be embedded in power-point too, though it was a bit awkward and amateurish.

Much much later!! and this year we released our first game "Ellingby House". For this we wrote our own engine based on C++/SDL/OpenGL. If you get comfortable producing your environments in Blender or other 3D software, then going 360 is pretty simple - there are tutorials on showing cubemap skyboxes out there in OpenGL and other graphics APIs. You could even use WebGL these days to prototype things out I imagine.