It basically allows you to apply a six sided texture (in the form of a cube) to an entity. Why would that be useful? Well as far as i can see, if you've ever used sphereical reflection mapping, you know the textures co-ords change according to where the camera is, giving the looks of a metalic shine or what not, but that is only a flat texture.
Say you took a point in your world and rendered the six direction, up, down, left, right, front and back, and used these as the cube map, and applied these to an entity, you would have a entity that is reflecting the real world enviroment. Pretty nifty :)
Say you took a point in your world and rendered the six direction, up, down, left, right, front and back, and used these as the cube map, and applied these to an entity, you would have a entity that is reflecting the real world enviroment. Pretty nifty :)