"Portals", space within a space - four dimensional spaces

One of the things I thought might be possible in a virtual world like secondlife hasn't yet been realized :-/

Im imagining portals much like those seen in Croquet (see attachment), but on a smaller scale. With these portals, users can create "interior" spaces that dont need to be rendered until someone has crossed into the portal. The image on the portal may be prerendered from the interior scene, or it may simply be a texture (to further reduce load). Once inside, the user can see the portal from whence she came, and can cross back into the "true" SL world at will. I want to see the laws of physics violated - building interiors bigger then the structure around it. Something like this can totally revolutionize the "land" concept. Ideally, you could be allowed more prims within the "portal-space", as they dont need to be rendered to passer-bys. The portal-space could be essentially unlimited. Of course, in order to preserve user-friendliness, there has to be some "bottom" where the portal can be accessed so the user can easily exit. (Or perhaps, an "exit portal-space" button could be added to the UI.)

While in the real SL world, the portal itself could be modified like a prim. In order to make the interface consistant, Im not sure how a prim from the real SL could be dragged into the portal, rather, I see things working better if the user has to cross into the portal-space before being able to edit prims within.

The main difference between the portal space I'm imagining and Croquet's is that each portal in the latter requires a seperate server AFAIK. That would prove WAY to cost-prohibitive for the average user , instead, portals should be implemented so that many can run simultaniously on one simulator.

Ah, what a relief! I finally got that idea out of my head and onto the table... yikes, it sounds like hell to implement though.
Im not so sure I should create a proposal for it...

Sounds very cool. It's not exactly 4 dimensional space though - from looking at the croquet website it looks more like usual 3d space but with added connections.

Implementation does sound hard, but perhaps not that hard. The border between neighbouring sims is effectively a portal, as far as I can see. It would probably screw with position coordinates something terrible though - perhaps the thing to do would be to have portals simply go to other sims.

You must script an orb prim (the shape is important), to gather residual waves from overhead land baron scanners. The orb then creates a magnetic field around itself which reaches critical mass in the presence of an avatar that wants to use it. Merely touching the orb during its critical mass state, causes multiple disruptions of the inner core, generating density waves, similar to a model of rush hour traffic in major metropolitan urbanities. These disruptions signal a second prim, cubic in form, to refocus eliptical waves back into the eyes of the avatar, and in reverse parabolic intrusion, nullify his synapses and convert the rods and cones of the eyes into small sky boxes, fooling the users brain into thinking he has entered an entirely new realm. But in reality, the image is a false one, and in the form of three dimensional stereoscopic models of nannovolumetric scale within each of the subjects eyes. You do this, and you gotcherself one helluva portal!