There is a great executable demo of the Egypt scene posted by Homey above. here is the link egypt.zip there is no source with this and from the looks of things on the site the author is probably not willing to give this information up (but I didn’t ask so who knows) regardless, with the working demo you can see the idea “render to image, blur image, display image” and it runs very very well tested it on my 533mhz Cpu, 320 mb Ram, 64mb NVIDIA Geforce, with no speed loss.

P.S. the demo flickers a bit when you walk around, just ramp up the size, for the effect and it looks really nice, (and still runs well).