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Comment by polyomino | Hacker News Reader

Ok now, I have a few separate colored lights pointing at the lamp. What color is the lamp? How about when it’s on?

Interesting. I assume you’d copy the object not the lighting. If you move a real object into a different room or outside you don’t expect the colour to stay the same. But if I’m pasting it into a word doc, I guess intuitively I might want it to look the same as source, but that breaks down unless I copy the whole virtual universe. A mirrored globe inside a room of mirrors is not going to look the same unless I copy the scene. People will learn this and maybe demand eg a choice of the copy scope. You might not even have rights to copy all objects. I can’t just copy your palace and paste it into mine unless you allow it (say).

That’s the entire crux. What exactly the hell is “the object”, and how does your target program DO anything to it, to include manipulating it, or getting it out to a GPU for rendering in some even vaguely terrible way - and you’re probably trying to render it 120 times (or more) a second with a decent level of resolution.

3D is not like tabular data. There isn’t some default resting state it naturally wants to exist in. It’s all edge cases and special logic. Also, it’s mind bogglingly vast amounts of raw data. Even a simple scene can contains hundreds of thousands of surfaces/polygons/spline patches/voxels/whatever representation.

A VR environment is essentially running a high end 3d game engine at all times.

Isn't this already a solved problem? See 3D apps, i.e. Blender, Unity, Unreal etc. You can copy objects easily.

I don't think the intention is to copy an object with the baked in lighting at the time of making a copy. I can imagine you just want to copy the object and the behavior how it reacts to whatever environment it's placed in.

Not between them.

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