Providing mobile devices with virtual environment walkthrough and real-time streaming movie playback capability is expected to have a profound impact to the entertainment-based applications, such as virtual guides, online gaming, and e-learning, just to name a few. However, it is well known that it is extremely difficult to render complex 3D scenes at interactive frame rates on thin mobile devices known for their lack of proper resources needed to process large volume of 3D virtual environment data. In order to provide virtual environment navigation on thin mobile clients, we propose a hybrid technique which combines both remote geometry rendering and streaming of warped images. In our approach, the server renders a partial panoramic view, which is based on the user's viewpoint and last movements. The server then warps the image's coordinates into cylindrical coordinates, and streams the images to the client device, which will progressively build the panoramic representation of the scene. Furthermore, in order to enhance streaming performance and quality of the interaction, we propose to use a rate control mechanism as well as a prediction of the user's movements within the virtual scene. In this paper we discuss our scheme for remote rendering and streaming of progressive panoramas for mobile devices, and present our experimental results we have obtained in order to validate our proposed technique. Our results indicate clearly that the proposed solution is able to achieve stable frame rates and throughput in error-prone wireless channels.