Generating surfaces from a set of coordinates

Hello all, I am currently working on a college project which involves building a device capable of generating a 3d surface model of static indoor environment. The device will use a rangefinder to collect a series of distances and convert them into a set of coordinates relative to its stationary position. These coordinates will be sent to a computer to generate the model. We were planning on using OpenGL to generate this model.

I have never used OpenGL so I’m currently running through whatever tutorials that I can find. I was wondering if somebody could point in the direction of an ideal method for this procedure. This isn’t something that will be used for professional purposes so there’s a large amount of leeway regarding quality. It simply has to be an aesthetically decent representation of an indoor environment. I was thinking of using GLUT to construct a gigantic triangle strip from every point but this is something I gleamed off of early reading. I’ll probably be back with more specific questions later once I’m more familiar with the API but for now I was just looking for a general direction/method. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Instead of triangle strip, I would advise to start with independant triangles.
Anyways the hard part is only to generate triangles from points. For this MeshLab seem to have good tools.
Drawing them with opengl is quite easy. Relying only on separate triangles will allow any input.