[TeMPOraL]

I dreamed of that since being a kid, so for nearly three decades now. It's been entirely possible even then - it was just a matter of using enough elbow grease. The problem is, the world is full of shiny happy people ready to call you a terrorist, assert their architectural copyright, or bring in the "creepiness factor", to shut down anyone who tries this.

[jsheard]

There's also just the fact that 1:1 reproductions of real-world places rarely make for good video game environments. Gameplay has to inform the layout and set dressing, and how you perceive space in games requires liberties to be taken to keep interiors from feeling weirdly cramped (any kid who had the idea to measure their house and build it in Quake or CS found this out the hard way).

The main exception I can think of is in racing simulators, it's already common for the developers of those to drive LiDAR cars around real-world tracks and use that data to build a 1:1 replica for their game. NeRF might be a natural extension of that if they can figure out a way to combine it with dynamic lighting and weather conditions.

[smokel]

Having destructible objects is in no way possible on contemporary hardware, unless you simplify the physics to the extreme. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your statement?

Recognising objects for what they are has only recently become somewhat possible. Separating them in a 3D scan is still pretty much impossible.

[idiotsecant]

Destructible environments have been a thing for like....a decade or so? There's plenty of tricks to make it realistic enough to be fun without simulating every molecule.

[chefandy]

A whole lot of manual work goes into making destructible 3D assets. Combined, I've put nearly a full work week into perfecting a breaking bottle simulation in Houdini to add to my demo reel, and it's still not quite there. And that's starting out with nice clean geometry that I made myself! A lot of it comes down to breaking things up based on voronoi tessellation of the surfaces, which is easy when you've got an eight-pointed cube, but it takes a lot more effort and is much more error prone as the geometric complexity increases. If you can figure out how to easily make simple enough, realistic looking, manifold geometry from real world 3d scans that's clean enough for standard 3D asset pipelines, you'll make a lot of money doing it.

[swiftcoder]

We've had destructible polygonal and voxel environments for a while now, yes. Destructible Nerfs are a whole other ball game - we're only just starting to get a handle on reliably segmenting objects within nerfs, let alone animating them

[TeMPOraL]

Two decades - see Red Faction, which is a first-person shooter from 2001.

[TeMPOraL]

My statement applies even without the destructive environment part - even though that was already mainstream 23 years ago! See Red Faction. No, just making a real-life place a detailed part of a video game is going to cause the pushback I mentioned.