With primecoin and the idea to make something useful out of the mining process I think it would be really cool to take all that processing power to generate art.
By art, I mean 3D art by rendering images. That is a computer intensive step in creating 3d art and specially animation. Small artists and studios could benefit from a render farm that would render their works, and a Coin that is mined by rendering images(frames of animations) would generate artistic value in the world while creating coins for the miners, that would not need to be artists themselves.
There are already free render farms (like
https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com) where artists can share the render processing among them, and gain points to have priority on the next renders, however, this is a close community. If it was a Coin, that would create Coins for the miner, anyone one could mine it for the Coins, while the artists didn't make Coins with it(unless they also mine), but would have their work rendered with much more powerful machines than they would probably ever have.
No matter how fast computers get, rendering engines also get more powerful in their simulations, and this is always a demanding task.
Blender's render engine (blender.org , the de facto free and open source 3D software) supports CPU and GPU render so there are lots of possibilities there.
There would be no incentive to just put useless projects to render, because the artists don't get any coins for the finished renders, only the miners.
If it stays within free and open source, (with Blender) large studios wouldn't benefit with it at the beginning at least, they have different tools and their own render farms, but would facilitate small independent studios from around the world to make projects that otherwise might not be possible.
I'm sure someone else already thought about this before and there are of course lots of technical stuff that I can't grasp(I'm just an artist), but I couldn't find anyone talking about this and would like to know what you think!
cheers,
Frederico.