new texture option: viewport

How about a "live viewport" texture option? This would allow a texture to show a real time representation of an arbitrary point in SL. The effect would be as if you had placed a camera at a coordinate and were viewing SL from there.

This would make possible: mirrors, telescopes and binocs, SL television, all kinds of weirdness.

Maybe it could be done as multicast streamed video. Or it could be just another 3D viewpoint rendered as if your avatar was looking at that spot.

It might bring framerate issues and privacy issues galore. It could be cool, though.

IF Implemented, it should be rendered server side, as the client would render at half-speed to render the mirror/TV/whatever, and not just one person, but anyone that can see the object (not nessesarily the textuded side, as SL has a poor object/triangle occlusion). This would mean that the server in general is a tiny bit slower, but the small texture render it makes is then sent to the client as a normal texture that's being animated.

Maybe this should be a special prim type of which there can be only a limited number in a sim (1 per every 512 sq. m?) as it would be using server resourses.

As described this wouldn't work for mirrors, because two people looking at the same mirror should see different images.

Also, it can't be implemented server-side without duplicating all the client code in the server, the hit on sim performance would be unbearable. They'd pretty much need a dedicated computer for each viewport.

... spycams, peeping tom devices....