Some excitement is starting to build as details emerge of Linden Lab's plans to incorporate a new type of building tool within Second Life that will make the rapidly expanding world more compatible with other 3D environments and open the design doors to more sophisticated and standardized tools.
Tao Takashi, who's recent chance conversations with a Quarl Linden has lead to the growing buzz says "it might mean that creating these sculptured prims is not for everybody. I guess the main way would be to use a 3D program and export it and this would mean also that more learning will go into making these things. At least you can do it with free tools aswell, such as Blender, so no money is involved. Additionally texturing such a prim might be more difficult than as it is now as there aren’t separate faces anymore but you’d need to do real 3D mapping as you do with 3D programs. So all in all it might raise the bar for some."
The technical details are a little beyond my basic knowlege, but the end result should be a much more flexible, mature and standardized system for building objects in Second Life that will at once make it harder for lesser talented builders to work with as well as make what can be done infinitely more complex, beautiful and useful. In answer to the question of why Sculpties, or Sculpted Prims, the names for the new forms, are being used, the Wiki page says:
Because there are a myriad of existing tools for handling images. Image compression, streaming, progressive loading, and animation are all well-explored problems. For example - we could create a quicktime stream which fades from one sculpt texture to another - attached to a sculpted prim, the prim would "morph" from one shape to the other. Or, as another example - 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. This is the direction we are headed.
So as you can see the scope of possibilities this change will make could be immense.