It would be really beneficial for a Texture Asset
to have the concept of LODs or quality levels. This would allow artists to author high-quality textures assets used in the editor, whilst also providing developers the ability to globally set a specific LOD ahead of the scene load. Although determining a specific LOD could be done in-engine, it would be hard to capture all use cases, therefore a more transparent approach that allowed developers to manually set a global LOD depending ahead of time would be much more beneficial. This would provide a better way of scaling desktop content to VR/mobile.
From the editor perspective, when the Texture compression pipeline is triggered there is an option to create half/quarter res textures. The editor by default uses the LOD 0 textures
Although this would be statically set for a given scene, A LOD api would open the door for developers to create dynamic view based LOD systems.