Sun Microsystems is experimenting (as we have reported in the past) with a three-dimensional desktop interface that could alter the way users see their screens–without the dorky glasses. First demonstrated at LinuxWorld in January, the “Project Looking Glass” initiative is a 3D Java-based, open source desktop that runs on Linux.
Sun Shows Off 3D Desktop
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Why would anyone want something like this besides the eye candy factor? I mean who would want to watch a movie or do spreadsheeps at such weird perspectives? Seems like a waste.
awww
i thought there were some new shots or videos 
There are. Search on our archives, there is a video of it linksed and some commentary on the comment section of that story from me, as I have seen the software running a few months ago at Sun’s offices.
I did a seacrh on Google two or three years ago and found a company who had made a 3D-desktop for Windows – the project was dropped because when they did a search on the projects name all they found was warez sites… new did find a working copy of it though.
yes thats the one at Xtreme tech preview.. i have it.. i just thought there were some new ones around
The video is on Sun’s site. It’s awesome to see:
http://wwws.sun.com/software/looking_glass/
Video demo:
http://wwws.sun.com/software/looking_glass/demo.html
Adding a 3d desktop has many advantages, it adds more workspace you can manipulate, it also lets you add a wheel of applications you can cycle through. Personally, I use virtual desktops ALOT when I code, because I have many different classes opened up at once. It would help with that. Also, adding a note to the back of an application is really useful. I like the idea of adding notes to an application since I tend to think of desktop work per application rather then per OS.
Sun did a demo of this at the Borland Developers Confernce in San Jose this pas November and it was very cool.
I’ve played a little with this new desktop (I’m a Sun employee and have access to it), the first time it looked pure eye-candy to me, but when I got used to it is pretty usable… I hope a public beta will come out soon so everybody can judge it by themselves.
I think that the 3D controls needs to be improved, I miss the ability to fix a perspective rotation, to have, by instance, 6 desktops making a distorted cube so you can (barely) see the other desktops for visible events, etc; but anyway it’s an amazing desktop!
Sorry for my baad English. Regards: ClawGrip
What´s about Alice (http://www.alice.org)
Kinda looks like MS BOB to me (the CDs part mostly).
I hope that they are coming up with some nice altrenatives to the desktop. I still would like to *use* the desktop if I wanted to but alternatives are nice
“Adding a 3d desktop has many advantages, it adds more workspace you can manipulate”
No, a 3D interface does not, but a vector interface that allows for window shrinkage does. Sun implimentation is a eye candy knock off on Apple’s wonderfully designed Exposé
“it also lets you add a wheel of applications you can cycle through.”
Yes, but it does it poorly.
“Personally, I use virtual desktops ALOT when I code”
But this isn;t a virtual desktop.
It’s very difficult to believe that Sun doesn’t actually have a roadmap for Looking Glass, considering how secretive they are about it. It’s apparently quite difficult to get ahold of even if you are a Sun employee.
If I had to speculate as to its intended use, I would guess that they intend to deploy it in conjunction with Sunray 3D, which will sport an nVidia 3D chipset. OpenGL commands will be tunneled directly through the Sunray wire protocol, and I can only assume the textures being mapped will be sent using the existing Sunray protocol, which provides more than enough performance to watch a DVD movie via remote display. Because Looking Glass is a Java application (and one written by Sun, at that) there should be no difficulty making it operate in conjunction with the Sunray server on Solaris, and JDS for Sunray.
As to the “thick client” versions of JDS, I’m doubtful that Sun would distribute Looking Glass with those versions. I think they see Looking Glass as something of a killer app, and I believe they’re too protective of it to simply give it to anyone who buys JDS.
Only time will tell…
No, a 3D interface does not, but a vector interface that allows for window shrinkage does. Sun implimentation is a eye candy knock off on Apple’s wonderfully designed Exposé
Oh please. Looking Glass was in development long before any information about Expose was leaked outside of Apple, and Looking Glass provides considerably different functionality from Expose. Expose is a window selection system, whereas Looking Glass is a complete 3D windowing environment.
do you have any info about the availability of it?
licence etc… will it be paid or free? an extra of a future JDS perhaps?
zoomable desktop research has been going on for many years.
The idea of an entirely zoomable user interface failed but parts of the idea have made it into OSX as a small feature.
Anyone who trusts Sun to design a desktop should check out Solaris which looks like rubbish and then take a look at other Sun projects like AWT or Self which also do not look that great.
Anyone who trusts Sun to design a desktop should check out Solaris which looks like rubbish and then take a look at other Sun projects like AWT or Self which also do not look that great.
CDE is an over decade old desktop environment which was more or less standardized across all Unices, and was designed when there were considerable limitations on the capabilities of framebuffers.
It’d be much better to judge them on something recent, most notably the JDS and the customizations/polish that Sun has added to Gnome.
This thing? An improvment? Maybe in slowing down the user more.
It looks beautiful, no denying that… but speed-wise, from the user perspective, I really think it is quite a bit slower than a 2D interface in that you can’t manage windows as easily.
There’s an Open University TV programme from the 1990s which demonstrates a 3d desktop from Sun, though it was considerably less sophisticated than what I saw of Looking Glass.
There are also several less sophisticated 3d environments/file managers for IRIX and Linux – I wrote about this stuff 2 years ago, I would dig up the article but it’s hideously out of date by now.
I don’t think it’s an Exposé knock off, but aside from the 3d, it does have some similartities in terms of window management. I personally don’t want a 3d desktop for purely practical reasons, but it did impress the hell out of me.
J…
Hi
I dont think this concept will take off. people already have a functional desktop on all operating systems. Learning a new way of interacting with your system for eye candy reasons would appeal only to a select few.
Sun employee
3ddesktop: http://desk3d.sourceforge.net
3dwm: http://www.3dwm.org
..but not written in Java.
Makes me wonder what the advantages are of Sun’s version.
Hi!
Erm…Sun presented us a great 3d desktop environment and you give us links to switchers for virtual desktops?
greetz
cocaxx
3d-desktop appears to be nothing more than a 3D workspace switcher.
3dwm seems to provide a mere fraction of the functionality of Looking Glass.
The only thing I’ve ever seen close to Looking Glass was Microsoft’s “Task Gallery” project, which was subsequently abandoned:
http://research.microsoft.com/ui/TaskGallery/index.htm
Watching the Looking Glass videos linked in earlier posts will give you a better idea of the capabilities of Looking Glass.
“Hi
I dont think this concept will take off. people already have a functional desktop on all operating systems. Learning a new way of interacting with your system for eye candy reasons would appeal only to a select few.
Sun employee”
Reminds me of the transition from CLI to GUI.
I’m sure 3D-Desktops will find their place besides CLI and 2D-GUI.
…only uglier and with crappy artwork. The windows tilted over the Z axis (depth) look pretty useless IMHO
Same was said in CLI times about the first windowing systems. That is the kind of question people make when new things appear for the first time: There is no real use for it. You don´t see usefullness now as CLI people, used to CLI iteration didn´t see the usefullness of a graphic 2D world until there appeared apps doing things for this new way of iteration, things that could not be made with the oldone.
“Looking Glass was in development long before any information about Expose was leaked outside of Apple”
First of all, nothing about Exposé (aside from a menu screenshot and the name itself) was leaked out of Apple. It was made known to the to the rumor community AND the public at the same time. When it was announced at a trade show. Second, can you show me what proof you have suggesting this was in development before Exposé was released? (Something specific would need to be revealed here… something that doesn’t simply leverage the OSes UI with vector graphics. I don’t doubt that Sun was making a UI with vector graphics similar to that which Apple had released 2 years before unveiling exposé) but I’d bet that Sun’s implementation of its vector graphics was heavily influenced by Apple.
“Expose is a window selection system, whereas Looking Glass is a complete 3D windowing environment.”
I’ve seen Looking Glass, I know what it does. The 3D capabilities don’t add any functionality other than manipulating multiple windows to make them more accessible than standard window overlapping. Sun’s implementation, though more flashy is still a window selection tool.
Apple was criticized for utilizing such window vector techniques as “the genie affect” where windows shrink-to and grow-from the dock in a genie-like fashion. Individuals said that it was merely eye candy that didn’t serve a purpose. These critics were wrong. It DOES serve a purpose. It shows, in the most obvious fashion possible, where in the dock the window was collapsed to.
Looking Glass on the other hand employs several UI functions which are implemented for no other reason other than flashiness.
Flashiness is fine if its utilization serves a direct purpose. otherwise, anything else is a prime example of bad user interface design.
The minute the new fd.o xserver gets released this will be as easy as pie on linux.
The composite extension will allow any program to access buffered contents of windows for ‘free’. Once a program has an image of a window, it can use it as a texture in any 3d enviorment it wants.
you can use transparent OLED on the top layer, then 2 or 3 centimeters back, that is where the LCD is and the desktop background is on there. active applications are on the OLED screen, inactive ones are on the screen behind it.
that would be an eye candy approach, but if you wanted to get use out of all that space, well, you would have to come up with some reason why one would need to use a desktop interface based on volume rather than area.
Okay, but how does Looking Glass compare to OpenCroquet (the experimental Squeak, uh, thingie
?
There’s a little information on Croquet here : http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/2901 if you haven’t seen it. Of course, if you haven’t seen it, you can’t answer my query.
TIA
As I see it,all the problem of people not seeing 3D desktops usefull is just a consecuence of 3D desktop running only apps made for 2D desktops just right now. The same happened with Windows (or X for that mather) running console aplications mostly when they first appeared. People didn´t see real use save for the eye-candy, until apps suited for the new paradigm started appearing, and using the new features. It is like people living in a 3D world (a real 3D world, not ours), not understanding the need for a fourth coordinate, they would not see real use for Time. Do you see a use for Time in the 4 dimencional-universe we live? I guess everybody here does.
The next step will obviously be a 3D interface, opening almost endless new possibilities for human interface design.
I’d definitely like to park my objects further behind the scene some times, but of course it will be difficult to make this actually manageable, especially with a primitive 2D input device. So I’m also sure that 3D desktops will remain a toy for another very long time. We haven’t even made 2D desktops that don’t suck yet.
yes, it is so obviouse because of all the obviouse advantages that the extra dimention offers…..like……
ummm…..
help me out here.
“As I see it,all the problem of people not seeing 3D desktops usefull is just a consecuence of 3D desktop running only apps made for 2D desktops just right now.”
I can see why you might come to that conclusion but you’re neglecting the fact that there are very distict requirements that a user interface must accomidate that are simply not very ideal in a 3D enviornment.
The only reason why the topic of 3D enviornments come up at all is that today’s operating systems mimic a 2D desktop metaphore. Making the enviornment 3D does not add usability, but instead only ads metaphore.
You might be able to make an operating system more usaful by eliminating all metaphores and then have it react to user unpit to determine what its supposed to do. For example, if an individul started typing, it would become apparent that a text editor of some type would need to launch… (you get the idea)
“The same happened with Windows (or X for that mather) running console aplications mostly when they first appeared. People didn´t see real use save for the eye-candy, until apps suited for the new paradigm started appearing, and using the new features.”
Its not the same because GUIs ARE better than inputting text from a usability perspective. (BTW your analogy doesn’t give credit to Apple and NeXT who popularized these UI changes… but instead creids it to Windows and X)
“It is like people living in a 3D world (a real 3D world, not ours), not understanding the need for a fourth coordinate, they would not see real use for Time.”
But working with a computer is totally different in that you have certain cpacial limitations to contend with so a whole new set of rules for interacting with your enviornment need to be developed to be efficient. Simply making the UI 3D neglects this point because it doesn’t take the limitations one would need to contend with when using a computer into perspective.
Ach, if you have to deal with software that involves making thousands of tweaks to thousands of virtual sliders in load of little windows (mixing under pressure in a virtual studio like Cubase) you would welcome any effort to make it easier.
It’s situations like that where you sometimes need an overview of a complex routing setup where 3d could help. God knows what a useful 3d gui would look like for virtual studios, but I keep thinking there must be a better way to display all that information. (And yes, I do have hardware controllers for it, but they have their own limitations).
“The next step will obviously be a 3D interface, opening almost endless new possibilities for human interface design.”
If it does happen, it would be adopted solely because people assuming that 3D is better than 2D (a higher number = better) rather than looking at the fact that the 2D was just an extension of the desktop metaphore which is what made computing easier than simply adding text.
“I’d definitely like to park my objects further behind the scene some times, but of course it will be difficult to make this actually manageable, especially with a primitive 2D input device.”
The problem with this metaphore is that you would literally have to interact with multiple rooms to find items rather than the metaphore being the equivilent of haing all items catagorized in folders in a filing cabinet right next to you.
Try to look at things from a usability perspective rather than a metaphore perspective.
“So I’m also sure that 3D desktops will remain a toy for another very long time.”
Lest anyone misunderstand, 3Difying a 2D desktop is eye candy but 3Ding an entire interface is bad interface design to the extreme. As long as sensable UI designers remain in control of our computers, we will never have to use a 3D enviornment to navigate our computers.
“We haven’t even made 2D desktops that don’t suck yet.”
There are some 2D UIs that don’t suck at all. The problem with 2D UI design is that it still confines us to the limitations that were thrust upon us 20 years ago when thats all the computational power allowed us to utilize.
The page you provide gives me a 404.
I’ve got the video working, saw it. It makes me wonder what the use of it exactly is. Because, what kind of use is it to watch a movie in non-2D mode? The best look is when you have it 2D, or 3D + flat. Then he minimizes the windows, which is what i call a (very) free way of having a taskbar. Current window managers also provide various non-standard solutions for that.
So it makes me wonder what kind of benefits it has because i haven’t noticed any in the video, except eyecandy which i also saw in 3ddesktop and 3dwm screenshots.
The task gallery video is at http://research.microsoft.com/adapt/TaskGallery/
I think speech input/recognition will be the interface of the future. I know that we’re not close to natural language recognition yet, but I think that would add the most to value to the desktop. Maybe when Longhorn ships, it will come with a fully immersed VR enviroment. http://www.nooface.net is a pretty good site with information about future and current GUI’s, if a little out of date.
-look, it’s Unix. I know this!
3D interfaces have been tried so many times before. Every time, it’s just some guy/team going, “Bam! Let’s take it up a notch! 3D is one more than 2D; it’s that much better!”, and then he tries it… and gets a crap interface.
What do you want to do with an interface? You want to quickly and easily manage several things in a easy to use and easy to learn way. This is exactly where 3D fails.
If you want to make things awkward, confusing and inefficient, go ahead. Just don’t take it out of the lab and make people do any real work with it.
// I’m going to start that video now to see how right/wrong I was…
GUIs became useful because of the mouse. When someone invents something that lets people easily use a 3d environment they will become useful.
That said sun playing around with this is a good thing. A working 3d gui will help people come up with a intuitive way to interact with it.
I think marketing is holding down sun. They need to either give more money to mark toliver(spelling) or fire him. They need a new vision..
As for the 3d desktop, It will be pointless for programmers and people like me. It will be heaven for gamers and teens that love to see neat things. since it looks so neat i think It will sell like wild–they need to hurry up and get a stable version. Again, I’m glade this is just an add-on optional feature that will be available eventually.
“I think speech input/recognition will be the interface of the future.”
Ya, I can imagine 100 people in an office all speaking to their computer. That’d be good.
“Maybe when Longhorn ships, it will come with a fully immersed VR enviroment”
Ya, Microsoft would actually be one of the few companies that would inject that UI abomination on the compouting landscape.
“A working 3d gui will help people come up with a intuitive way to interact with it.”
Sun’s implimentation is not a 3D gui though. Its a 2D UI with 3D eye candy.
“since it looks so neat i think It will sell like wild”
And then when people get it home and try to use it and realize that navigating the OS is twice the work and then take it back.
“Again, I’m glade this is just an add-on optional feature that will be available eventually.”
Too bad its that this OS can be so dramatically customized and thus make it inconsistant with its own self.
The only thing I saw that was remotely 3d was stacking the windows at an angle so you could see what they look like while they’re tucked away. You could easily simulate this with 2d. Perhaps they did.
“rather than looking at the fact that the 2D was just an extension of the desktop metaphore which is what made computing easier than simply adding text.”
And so is the third dimension. It’s already used in some way on every popular desktop, so I don’t see how people can claim that 3D would be completely pointless.
“The problem with this metaphore is that you would literally have to interact with multiple rooms to find items rather than the metaphore being the equivilent of haing all items catagorized in folders in a filing cabinet right next to you.”
I didn’t mention any metaphor at all, I mentioned moving objects in 3D space.
“Try to look at things from a usability perspective rather than a metaphore perspective.”
That’s not an argument, it’s an offense.
“Lest anyone misunderstand, 3Difying a 2D desktop is eye candy but 3Ding an entire interface is bad interface design to the extreme.”
You seem to only consider black and white states of “completely 3D” and “completely 2D”. As you pointed out, a 3D desktop isn’t necessarily different in human interaction than a 2D desktop, but it opens a lot of possibilities.
Maybe actually using the third dimension for moving objects isn’t feasonable yet, but that’s mostly just a limitation of our 2D input device. Keyboards sucked for 2D interfaces, which only really make sense using the mouse (of course you can use a desktop using the keyboard, but it’s everything but intuitive). The limitation of 2D displays might also be a problem for depth recognition, but problems are there to be solved some day.
There are some 2D UIs that don’t suck at all.
Maybe there are some concepts that don’t suck, but nothing that is actually used. The desktop metaphor is very sound, but all current desktop UIs are full of limitations and work-arounds, making it worse than it should be (obvious examples would be MDI, file selectors and the concept of “saving” in general).
I think speech input/recognition will be the interface of the future. I know that we’re not close to natural language recognition yet, but I think that would add the most to value to the desktop.
Speech recognition is rather a complementary feature than a replacement. I currently imagine the ultimate user interface to be a real 3D environment with speech recognition for services. For example it would make sense to ask the computer to “find the blueberry project I was working on yesterday” or to “mute the sound”, but it would hardly make sense to ask the computer to move an object to the side of your screen(/ holographic projector
) or to tell him how you want a certain image to be drawn.
3d computer interfaces suck.
The reason why is because we are, inherently, not part of this virtual 3d system. The solution is suprisingly simple but I have never heard of anybody exploring it. I think we have to start to move out of the “computer” universe, and integrate computers more and more into our regular universe. In effect, we need to make better use of the 3d system we already have (God’s immersive 3d engine if you will).
I envisage a time when on my physical desk will not be a single fixed monitor, but rather a collection of thin, flexible displays, each one with a different application interface displayed on it (using the term “window” for these displays becomes either redundant or suprisingly accurate, im not sure which).
I pick up the display that has the news on it from where I left it on my physical desk (amongst all my other bits of paper and stuff). The news browser software on the central computer keeps the display up to date so I know when I pick it up there will be fresh news.
When I want to swap from reading/watching the news and start to look at my photo collection I do not have to fiddle around trying to move virtual objects in an artifical 3d system. I literally “put down” the news window, and pick up either a window I had set aside for photo viewing, or an unused window, and begin to work with my photos, dragging things with my stylus/fingers etc.
I then hear a sound. The computer, recognising I am at my desk, tells me that I have 4 new messages. I ask the computer to read them out to me. One of the messages is in video format so the computer asks me if i would like to direct it to the display I am currently holding. I accept the computers suggestion, watch the video, then the display returns to my photos.
Every now and then, I tidy my desk up. I place my displays into a pile. I pick up one of the displays though, one that isnt being used for anything important, and ask the computer to show the picture of my wife on it. I lean this one up against the wall and smile. That one can stay just there for a while.
I think it looks really good and would be neat but my question is how much memory will it use. Looks resource intensive.
although LG has limited extra usability than current 2d desktop, i bet anyone will give it a try once its published.
the point is will sun put LG public on web or its only goin to be included inn their own java desktop? time will tell.
if LG has no integration with the current DE gnome kde itself then the whole 3d desktop is worth of nothing.
meaning i still goin to have kicker as panel(program launcher system tray taskbar…) instead of apple iconbar inspired 3d bar, icons/folder on my desktop…
memory usage is another issue since its written in java…
The best solution I’ve heard yet!!
all i can say is wow.. It looks awesome.
I wonder what the specs of the comp running the demo where.. they mention linux so i take it it runs on present day x86 based hardware it seemed to be so smooth and fast.
I dont know what people are complaining about. Here is sun showing you hey look what we have done. It looks freaking awesome, look at the kicker/panel, have you even viewed it ? before coming to the decision of oh it wont serve any purpose,
So what if it turns out only to serve as eye candy whats the point of hardware getting faster and better if we dont use it at capacity.
Im freaking tired of people moaning.. All i can say is well done sun.. to the guy going about expose, how much of expose have you seen ? apple announces they are developing xyz so what sun are demoing their 3d desktop..
now to take into respect oleds are being developed and will soon be in the mass market means we will have much larger screens in the next few years. This 3d desktop will be truly useful on bigger monitors.
having multiple windows as they showed in the desktop lined up in the 3d space.. which allows you to look at 3 or 4 at the same time.. how many times have you placed 2 windows side by side when coding for example, only to have to keep on reducing the width well you wont have to. You put them diagonally on the screen and can have the middle which is the window your coding from and others on each side which you can look at eg documentation or another class file or whatever.. It saves time. The best solution available now for this is multiple monitors.
Trust me there will be a heck of a lot of uses for it.. It just looks freaking awesome aswell.
organising icons on the z axis aswell as on the x and y axis.
organising open windows on the desktop like cd cases horizantally ( on the side bit you can see what the prog is the demo showed that ) then going through the list opening up any one.
right ill just open up kmail put it diagonally to the right then reply to the message (no pissing abolut with widths or heights)
thats ultimately what it removes in usability the fact that you have to constantly piss about with width / height to be able to view and reply or view and write view one window and minimise the other.. dont forget everytime you piss about with width / height you have to unpiss about with it.
It has a lot of potential, the eye candy side is a definate plus aswell.. Eye candy attracts eyes to look at it. At the end of the day how many wows did mac osx get when it got first released ? how many people thought wow this looks nice ?
how many people when you go into a store and see linux loaded up with this will think wow, thats awesome ?
if looking nice didnt matter then we wouldnt judge by looks and all would probably be wearing a piece of warm cloth to cover our genitals and keep us warm..
If looks didnt matter then there would be no need for ui design to be improved. We would all be using stuff like cde.. It looks shit but works well.
I hope sun release a beta soon
I think someones been watching a bit too much star trek, but yes that will probably be the future..
i can understand exactly what you mean and thought along your lines except immersed in a 3d comp world rather than comp immersed in our world.
theres 2 answers to that problem,
one is to immerse ourselves in a comp gen 3d world as in carry the comp with us at all times and have a pair of glasses/ small eye piece that allows us to browse through the 3d world along with our natural world, some university professor has been working on this in the states.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/01/14/internet.cyborb.ap/inde…
or the other way is as you described kind of like star trek where the computer interacts with our world instead of us interacting with the computer
but we wont see either for a long time.
I watched the video and was impressed by the performance of the demo. What kind of machine would be required to get that performance out of a graphics intensive system written in Java? All the same, it really doesn’t look like a 3D environment, not that that’s a bad thing. In a 3D environment, you’d be able to navigate through a 3D world, which doesn’t seem to be the case here. It looks like they have a dock from which to run programs rather than accessing them through locations within the world. Also, the applications are standard 2D apps which appear to be wrapped in a fancy window manager which allows them to be rotated in 3D. It looks pretty cool, but it’s hard to say whether this is more useful than what is available without getting a chance to try it first hand. One thing is certain: they better get a release out soon so they can beat Longhorn to market.
I would not have to be too long before having multiple small physically seperate displays could become useful.
For something like X11 it should be very easy to get the software do do it (ok, maybe not the voice recognition part, but certainly the physical window management).
After all, it is only a matter of sending UI’s to the correct displays available, rather than trying to make all application windows share a single screen as we do now.
You essentially become your own window manager, obviously with some help from the computer.
All we need are affordable, light, wireless displays.
You could probably trial such a technique with a bunch of WIFI enabled PDA’s running Linux.
As a lot of you have pointed out, this is not something that is going to invade the mass market just yet. One problem is interface – I certainly don’t want to use a mouse to interact a 3D-desktop. Games are OK, but they have very limited rules and those rules are there to intertain – apply the same rules in a desktop-environment and people would be servely displeased. Camera control (which is the main issue, as I see things) could be made more effecient if you could store positions in a “quick camera” thing – sort of like short-cuts on a desktop.
However – 2d monitors are another big issue. Games, which use 3D, aren’t real 3D – have you ever notiched the swirl effect when you move the camera in circles? The problem is that it’s just simulated 3D on a 2D surface (your monitor). For something like this to really be great you would need a holographic projector of some sort that can produce REAL 3d images.
The differences to CLI and 2d-desktops are not nearly as great as the differences between the 2d and the 3d dektops. 2D is, afterall, the way we are used to reading text. Have a look around you. How much of the worlds information is presented in a non-2d environment? Even when drawing on paper, most people are horibbly bad at useing 3 dimensions.
I do, belive however that some day, when we have the interface devices for it (not requireing speech and not useing a 2d monitor) 3d desktops are going to blast the 2d versions of the market – it’s just not yet (unless sun is introduceing those devices ofcourse).
As always, SUN copies Microsoft…
Since most people have no idea about this, let me quote:
###############################
In 1992 when Microsoft released a technology called ODBC to standardise the connecting and programming to different databases.
Four years later, in 1996, Sun came up with the JDBC specification which not only had a very similar name was designed to do exactly the same thing!
This same story has been repeating itself for the last 9 years:
– 1996 Microsoft releases ASP; in 1998 Sun releases JSP
– 1997 Microsoft releases ADSI; in 1998 Sun releases JNDI
– 1997 Microsoft releases MSMQ; in 1998 Sun releases JMS
– 1997 Microsoft releases Microsoft Transaction Server; in 1998 Sun
releases EJB
– 1998 Microsoft releases MSXML; in 2001 Sun releases JAXP
– 2000 Microsoft releases Queued Components; in 2001 Sun releases
Message Driven Beans
– 2000 Microsoft releases XML Web Services; in 2001 Sun releases Java
Web Services Developer Pack
#################
Each time SUN releases an exactly similar new technology ***AFTER*** Microsoft, and most of the time, SUN’s version is only a “reference implementation” or “spec” while Microsoft’s is a FINAL PRODUCT.
Now, MS DID copied a lot of SUN’s Java for .NET languages & CLR. It did add some new stuff in C# though.
And, then, as if it can not resist, SUN came along and produced Tiger (Java 1.5) which COPIES ONCE AGAIN what MS has added to C# (Generics, Autoboxing, enchanced for loop, metadata, etc).
As for the “3D desktop”, yep, MS reasearch had one long ago
called Task Gallery:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:obiozHebEuIJ:research.microsof…
(sorry for the Google path, they have changed the link in MS research site, and the new is not in my bookmarks).
It’s not like MS doesn’t copy/steal from other companies (ha!). But SUN has a unique talent to copy every enterprise framework MS specifically puts out.
So, there you have it.
we already have 3D charts in office suite for more than ten years.
any idea to integrate that, take advantage of 3D desktop?
Of course Sun are going to release similar stuff to MS soon after them if they don’t release something first. They’re COMPETITORS! Hardly surprising really is it?
CLI and 2D interfaces are vastly different. At current the differences are much greater than those between the 2D and 2.5D solutions offered (it still uses flat surfaces).
Someone said we need 3D input devices. maybe so but they still need to be sat on the desk and operated with one hand. The stuff at the end of the matrix looked cool but how long do you really want to wave your arms around for in front of your pc?
The way I see it is that no matter if it’s any more functional it looks absolutely wicked, and I for one would run it without a second thought since it will still be able to use CLI in a 3d interface
As for the machine specs it should run on any machine with a half decent 3D card, games etc. would still probably need to run full screen (at least initially) since they require the full attention of a graphics card in order to run well. When you’re looking at your dekstop in Windows/Linux/OSX/BSD/etc. they are pretty much sat there doing nothing and could easily cope with this.
My 2.9 cents methinks.
i think this is what you meant to link
http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:0iAS3NWw8yoJ:research.microsoft….
im downloading the video on their site frankly all ive seen is talk so far from it.. (and thats after 10 megs another 60 to go.. sounds like hot air so far)
face it this is another cairo.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MicrosoftCairo aka vapourware from the great MS.
and i dont think microsoft released generics sun were working on generics for java for a long time. microsoft recently announced the addition of generics i think.
and lets not forget sun releases java a PLATFORM INDEPENDANT language whos idea was to be able to be run on any platform.. microsoft then release a bastardised version of it only on their platform.
ASP sucks arse compared to jsp or servlets. Frankly i cant be bothered to go through the rest of the list because microsoft more than likely pirated them from other sources.. and as usual f**ked up the pirate by basterdizing it.
Atleast what sun releases is usually platform independant.. even looking glass will be able to be run on sun solaris and linux..
hmm lets now look at stability of sun servers and microsoft servers… infact lets not theres no point, sun beats MS hands down.