Ok, so projecting an image isn’t hard at all in POV-Ray.  I’m not sure what I was thinking.  In my first post on camera calibration in POV-Ray, I suggested that we could analytically solve for lens and topographic distortion in POV-Ray.  I haven’t gotten far as I don’t have a work project to take advantage of this yet, but I projected a false color infrared image from a Landsat image over Argentina onto the walls of virtual building.  The walls would be replaced with topography, the camera with an orthographic camera, and some lenses would be in-between, but at least it is a start.  It is basically just a modified version of some example code from Boris van Schooten.  Just so long as a photon scene does something similar, the rest of the problem shouldn’t be too hard to solve.  With my schedule as it is right now, about 3 hours of coding is probably about 3 months though… .

union {
polygon {5, <0,0,0>, <0,1,0>,<1,1,0>,<1,0,0>,<0,0,0>}
disc {<0.5, 1, 0>, <0, 0, 1>, 0.5}
pigment {
image_map {jpeg “landsat-argentina.jpg” interpolate 2 filter all 1.0 }
scale <1,1.5,1>
}
finish{ambient 1.0}
translate x*-0.5
scale <20,20,1>

translate z*13.9
}