Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2 confronted a T-1000 - a liquid metal villian capable of shape changing. Second Life, in a way, strives to touch a similar star with its "sculptured prim" feature, a new user tool for generating shapes from textures ("images"). At least this is a direction they claim to be heading.
The Second Life wiki has a write-up. The gist, however, is that they are now offering a capability where one can import an RGB texture and map it into XYZ space (fn1) - thereby estimating the original shape (3d model). Mark Wallace has a good write-up on its anticipated impact in the Second Life ecosystem, notably that it may impact a vibrant modeling service economy there.
CNet (and other press reflectors) emphasize the ability to generate "organic" shapes from textures - which can be produced from a variety of tools. I think, however, the more ambitious view is the more interesting one. From the Second Life wiki:
...it would be easy to have a flash animation generate a sculpted prim - and when a resident touches a spot on its surface, the shape could wiggle and ripple appropriately.
Dynamic shapes responsive to their environment. Sounds cool, we'll see. Hasta la vista.
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From Second Life wiki:
fn1.
For those familiar with computer graphics - a sculpt texture is very similar to a normal map, but instead of encoding surface normals we encode surface positions. They are also similar to displacement maps, but instead of a single scalar distance we have three values (for each of X, Y, and Z.) They are also very similar to parametric (e.g. nurbs) surfaces.
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