'Looking Glass' video (Real Media). Demo of a 3d Desktop ...

[MacBytes]

Category: Videos
Link: 'Looking Glass' video (Real Media). Demo of a 3d Desktop from SUN.

Posted on MacBytes.com

Approved by arn

[leet1]

oh my god...I want that operating system....

Project Looking Glass is being created to work with the Solaris and Linux desktop environments using Java technology

I'd use linux even more if I could have those features

[noxes]

Looks kind of like exposé, but better.

[Keynoteuser]

I like the notes on the Back of a page, but what happens when you close the window? Where does the note go?

The HUGE icons at the bottom get in the way, and the compressed windows at the side take up too much room. While the technology is cool, they really didn't USE it when they made it, that's obvious or things would shrink more. Some of the technology is IN OS X now, and some of it could be added easily. Overall, it wasn't THAT much cooler than OS X.

[leet1]

Originally posted by Keynoteuser
I like the notes on the Back of a page, but what happens when you close the window? Where does the note go?

They are probably stored in the file

The HUGE icons at the bottom get in the way, and the compressed windows at the side take up too much room.

Thought the same thing. I bet they could make it scalable

Some of the technology is IN OS X now, and some of it could be added easily.

Yea, once longhorn comes out, they could do something similar to this as well since its going to use directx in the UI, probably wont though.

This is eye candy + functionality. I like it

Will they be selling this soon? or giving it away with their current OS?

[danielfe]

As far as moving things to the side, I dont see how that is any better than the osx dock. infact the dock is smaller.

The notes on the back are cool,

[1macker1]

WOW, someone using Real Player format!

[mainstreetmark]

I regularly have so many windows that the stack of windows would meet in the center.

I struggle with the number of windows even with exposé. In all-window mode, I'm left with 20 or 30 tiles that all look like sourcecode windows, and I have to mouseover them all. Here are some enhancements I've come up with, that i've already feedbacked to apple.

- Labeling an exposé'd window with windowname or app icon.
- Being able to scale all windows, or certain ones, by a small factor, for example, 90% (this would give me more effective space)
- Being able to auto-scale background windows a certain amount.
- a Minimize that doesn't fill up the dock with even MORE stuff (I don't use minimize at all, since doing so make all my dock icons shrink). Minimize-In-Place was a cool haxie I had at one point, but i don't use haxies, since moving to a different Mac would be awkward.
-- perhaps mousing over a dock app icon would present a second row with that apps windows. I've been meaning to screenshot that idea, as it's hard to explain.
- I'd like to be able to twist a window (along the z-axis) so that I could stack windows on top of each other, but still see corners I could click on. Right now, I have to have them all sized differently, and I still get smaller ones lost on top of larger ones.

Of course, if Dreamweaver had a single-document-interface kind of setting, that would be groovalicious too.

[Matty P]

It's good to see that they are trying to get people to 'Think Different'!!!!

I like the comment at the end of the video 'The dominant company that provides the desktop' and then something about how they don't want to change bla bla bla

[Blaaze]

Looks cool. In my opinion it provides more eye candy than functionality. The guy demonstrated something very similar to exposé, but 3D-ish. Still when they fold to the side, they still take up a considerable amount of screen area.

This shows us that the 3D metaphor approach is very feasible in the future and will open new ways for us to interact with our computers. But from the demo, the desktop is still a desktop except it wiggles a little bit. What I think would be cool is to have the 3D analogue of a 2D desktop, and make it an environment. Maybe a room, decorated with real wallpaper, or maybe your environment can be a big open field to place your documents or programs. I don't know if it would be harder or easier to navigate though. Still the possibilities are endless.

[simX]

The only really useful thing I saw in that demo was the notes feature on the back of each window. However, I probably wouldn't even use that.

Not to belittle the demo... it did seem pretty cool. But being able to see windows from their sides is pretty useless, since they were originally developed as a 2D metaphor, so looking at a side other than the front provides no more information.

I'd like to echo the other people's comments that "putting away" the window just takes up *WAY* too much space. I'm surprised they even made a demo with that in there. I mean seriously, it takes up the whole height of the screen, and about 20 pixels across (from what I can see). Lots of windows would definitely make that feature kind of stupid. Exposé combined with Dock minimization is much more elegant.

Speaking of exposé, there are a few things that I would like enhanced in future versions of Panther: the ability to use hidden and/or minimized windows with exposé, and the ability to have exposé show titles for all windows by default, not just when you mouse over them. This last feature is particularly important when you have a whole bunch of windows open -- as a poster previously mentioned, windows can get pretty similar looking at even 50% of their size.

One eye-candy thing in exposé that would be really fun to play with but could also fix that last problem is a magnification for exposé like the Dock. Heehee, I can see it now -- BLORP.

As for transparency and that dock-like thingy at the bottom in the Sun demo... well, all I can say is that I'm already able to use those features.

[killmoms]

Even the stuff shown in the demo isn't the best ever, it's a step in the right direction. And, the 3D desktop (not a desktop that wiggles as someone above pointed out) could be an interesting way for Apple to implement Multiple Desktops that all the Linux users are clamoring for.

Imagine, at least four desktops that you can just rotate 90º to see. Go to your right, store all your IMs there. Store Photoshop on your middle one. If you want to move a window to another desktop, just sling it sideways and it'll fly over there.

Or, don't even have a set number (i.e. in a cube). Just have a continuous 360º cylinder in which to store windows, where you can rotate. Clicking on a window in the dock will automatically shift the view to there.

Yeah, something like that would be cool. I mean, I'd use it.

--Cless

[Xero]

I think you guys are being WAY too critical. this is simply a technology demo, and a VERY impressive and groundbreaking one at that. for a long time ive thought about how awesome a dynamic 3D desktop would be, where windows could be freely sized, moved and rotated about with ease, and then some new apps using multiple sided cubes, etc, etc... this demo is so incredibly close to what ive seen in my mind that i was throughly shocked and excited by the whole thing. whats also interesting, is that though this IS a breakthrough and all, it doesnt seem like itd be that incredibly hard to create, and it feels like it should have come about years ago, instead of now. but like the guy said on stage: the main reason it has taken so long, is because of monopolistic companies that suppress change and mostly discourage it. (M$! *Cough...Cough*).

Also, you people need to remember this is a DEMO, of TECHNOLOGY. just because those windows that moved to the side took up so much room, doesnt mean that theyll ALWAYS be that way and it cant be done any other way, duh.

[Laslo Panaflex]

I think that the demo was awsome, it is a step in the right direction. To echo someone else's thought in this thread, they need to add the ability to make the desktop a sphere so to speek, kinda like sitting inside of one of those motorcycle sphere's of doom where they ride around real fast and go all around the thing. So, if you were running out of space in front of you, pan to the left and voila, more desktop space. Better yet, if you have covered up the desktop space to the left and right, pan up and down to see even more desktop space.

I think that it would be the next step and really change the desktop experience and make a single monitor setup more useful.

Very exciting, can't wait to see what happens to the OSs in the near future.

[ariel]

Hate to be negative (which i'm usually not)... but there is very little I saw in that demo that is useful. Won't rehash what everyone said here because most of it is right on...

but think reality - what we deal with most on computers is documents - 2 dimentional documents. We don't really need them to be 3-d except as eye candy.

Maybe I'm not thinking out of the box, but i don't even really see the demo's CD player as a bunch of rotating CD images as useful... in iTunes, I have so many CD's they wouldn't make sense visually - and when they are all physically on a rack in the real world, I sort them as a list and find what i want via a list - which again is 2-d. I'd go crazy looking for images of CD covers!

So, let's get real - there doesn't really seem to be much need for 3-d in the computer world.

gaming is another whole issue.

That's my opinion and i'm sticking to it

[ariel]

Originally posted by Xero
how awesome a dynamic 3D desktop would be, where windows could be freely sized, moved and rotated about with ease, and then some new apps using multiple sided cubes, etc, etc...

What is so useful about rotating windows? or cubes? Just what good would that do? It is just pure eye candy IMHO.

Please just explain to me in logical terms one application that would possibly make any use of a cube... there isn't anything in the real world that you currently interact with that is in that shape (except for a rubik's cube)... documents don't lend themselves to that - web pages don't either.

If it made so much sense, books would be cubes. They aren't.

The technology has been around for a long time to do 3-d OS's - there have been plenty of experiments with them in the last 10 years... but they all failed because nobody can really find any usefulness in a 3-d desktop.

[Nermal]

Well, that was interesting, reminds me a bit of Exposé. I guess OS X 10.4 will include something like this now

PS. If anyone's broadband-impaired and can't stream the video, I might be able to upload it somewhere (21 megs).

[Nermal]

Originally posted by leet1
oh my god...I want that operating system....

Go download Solaris

Note: I highly doubt that this 3D desktop is implemented in the current version of Solaris.

[ezmobius]

I could see some definate uses for a cube interface element. Just imagine all of your different layers and tool pallettes in photoshop on a cube...it would only take up a small piece of screen real estate but it could have six sides full of liitle palletee windows. This is definately a step in the right direction IMHO. And in case peple are wondering this is going to be open source!

[leet1]

Originally posted by Nermal
Go download Solaris

Note: I highly doubt that this 3D desktop is implemented in the current version of Solaris.

thanks man, always willing to try out a new OS, hehe

[dracoleb]

I think this is the future. It seems that every-time something goes from black and white to color people are always saying "that's pointless" or "why would you need that?" This is the same sort of thing, going from 2d to 3d. I just wish that the first we saw of this was at an Apple keynote with OS XI

[Nermal]

Originally posted by leet1
thanks man, always willing to try out a new OS, hehe

Yeah, I noticed from your Linux rants

[floatingspirit]

This is not intended to be a Powerbook rumor, but...for what its worth (or not) I "heard" that a certain company was already manufacturing screens for use on laptops to provide a 3D display. I'm afraid I can't elaborate, but that struck me as pretty cool. It was implied that the screen had something to do with generating the 3D aspect, not just the computer's OS. The source of this info is solid, but the details aren't.

[arn]

Originally posted by floatingspirit
This is not intended to be a Powerbook rumor, but...for what its worth (or not) I "heard" that a certain company was already manufacturing screens for use on laptops to provide a 3D display. I'm afraid I can't elaborate, but that struck me as pretty cool. It was implied that the screen had something to do with generating the 3D aspect, not just the computer's OS. The source of this info is solid, but the details aren't.

Sharp is making these already

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1335241,00.asp

[leet1]

Originally posted by floatingspirit
This is not intended to be a Powerbook rumor, but...for what its worth (or not) I "heard" that a certain company was already manufacturing screens for use on laptops to provide a 3D display. I'm afraid I can't elaborate, but that struck me as pretty cool. It was implied that the screen had something to do with generating the 3D aspect, not just the computer's OS. The source of this info is solid, but the details aren't.

This would be what your talking about

http://slashdot.org/articles/03/08/2...id=137&tid=196

NEC Corp. plans to market a laptop computer next year that can display 3-D images without requiring special glasses... The new laptop will feature a special liquid crystal display panel that is placed on top of a conventional screen. Users will be able to view digital photos of [sic] play online games with the 3-D image display or use the standard panel for viewing Web sites, Nikkei said. ... Mercury3D, a software company in Chiba Prefecture, Japan, will also provide a program that converts standard 2-D images to 3-D on the new laptop, Nikkei said.