I would recommend voxels personally. But, the point is not that, you could use lod triangles anyway in software. The point is in up and coming hardware, this would be very cool. This is just another way to look at things I have been thinking of. The first one is polarised voxels.
Every point has a distance and angles it is centre.
This would cain for rotating large models. Also I can thinking of lighting speed ups and a style of rendering that would make the object inherintly curved. Of course, saving a sphere map, and using a few cheats, we never have to save the unit vectors, as they are mapped at runtime. This is probably not new, but anyway, for lack of a better name, I'll call it Spherical Volumetric mapping, which is just a description really. I have to think about this one, but I will keep you guys updated.