Before Hardware Lighting made it's glorious debut in SL, I made a post suggesting SL implement more hardware driven effects. Visual tweaks that those of us with decent videocards could take advantage of to make SL that much more pretty, and perhaps even draw more people to SL with graphics on-par with or better than many high-end games.
For polygon pushing, SL is no slouch. Avatars alone push enough polygons to take up a sizable chunk of the poly limit for a game like DOOM3 or Call of Duty 2's level design. Go to any club and I'm certain you'll see a girl or twenty, each alone whose hair could bring a decent videocard to its knees weeping.
Still, point being that SL pushes polygons, and when residents use that well we get some great avatar designs and architecture. It's in the effects department that SL lags far behind popular videogames in what the common computer user expects out of something like SecondLife.
At the time I originally posted my thoughts on the matter, the first negative responses I saw all seemed to hold a common theme, that LL does not do 'hardware' effects of any kind, and software rendering such effects would be out of the question due to the strain on computer resources.
However, now we have hardware lighting effects, so why not more? The general populace would get the benefit of SL, which many spend a significant amount of time in, looking prettier. LL would reap the benefit of drawing more of the crowd who place a strong level of importance on graphics and effects.
Such effects are already commonplace in videogames. Like hardware lighting posed no significant computer strain for those who already had decent videocards, I imagine other effects like soft-focus, motion blur, point-of-view focus, light bloom, and others would work well with the hardware many of us already have. And for those that it didn't work well with, like with hardware lighting those people could simply turn the option off.
Now, rather than clutter the forum with another thread, another idea I've been thinking of has been HUD attachments that do not interfere with in-world interactions.
Imagine using an animated texture to give SL a grainy horror-film look, or a black and white movie appearance. How about animated displays for asthetic appearances? Give SL a sepiatone effect, or the appearance of viewing the world through a slightly foggy space helmet? Maybe have animated raindrops dripping down across your screen?
Right now, the only major obstacle to these ideas is that once you put them on, forget clicking on anything in-world, or maneuvering your camera using the mouse. A seperate set of HUD attachment points, attachment points that would render the onscreen HUD objects as not interferring with in-world interaction, would solve that.
Is it feasible? Only your local Linden knows for sure.