Reflection without maps

I am kind of lost but I am interested in creating reflection shaders and have been looking at cube mapping and environment mapping but at the end of the day I cannot easily see how to use these in a context like a corridor scene, where the corridor scene is a complex scene built from many textured objects.

Say, I had a 'robot' object flying through the corridor and other objects that all reflected a complex corridor scene and the corridor components reflect the 'flying objects'. It seems too complex for an environment or cubic map.

Is ray tracing each object the way to go about this, I am thinking in terms of a slow rendering process as opposed to real time.