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Simon Phipps Looks At 'Looking Glass'
CitizenC writes "Simon Phipps, chief technology evangelist for Sun Microsystems, describes his experiences using Project Looking Glass, Sun's prototype three-dimensional computer desktop, in this post on his weblog. He mentions a couple of demo videos too."
It all depends on finding a terse and intuitive gesture mechanism through which the interface may be navigated. I think my preferred approach would be to present the nominal view of the user's desktop as though it were the interior of a hemisphere, wherein all of the various windows and widgets reside, as though they were affixed to the interior of this sphere. Then, a simple move of the mouse rotates the sphere along the X and Y axis, and when finally something of interest is in view, you either click or use the scroll wheel on the mouse to zoom in and make it the active window.
Kind of like a big virtual desktop, only you get to peek at what's over the horizon.
From the given picture, it doesn't appear that they're doing this though. It seems as though all of the objects have transformation matrices that are independent of one another, and without any common point of reference, which suggests an elaborate interface.
But as they say, it's a prototype.
We do need to do something about windows. It's been twenty years already. We should be better than this. Is the answer to display them at funky angles? I'm not sure. But it's nice to see that somebody somewhere is trying, even if the whole exercise is about nothing more than moving Sun's price on the market.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
A mouse should be enough. Scroll wheels-- or perhaps even a four-directional switch near the scroll wheel-- could be used for additional axis control.
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
I've always imagined people using something other than a monitor to view a 3d desktop and something other than a mouse to navigate it. Something Like VR glasses that could also track your eye movement, etc.
I don't find a 3d desktop using current interfaces that exciting, nor do I think it would be a boon to productivity. Sure does look purty though
The more dimensions you've got, the more places things can get lost -- this applies equally for car keys, lost souls, and music files. One of the beauties of a two dimensional windowing environment is it puts everything right up front where you can see it. A three dimensional environment creates the same problems I've already got in my house; things could be anywhere.
How long will it be before people using this environment spend an hour rummaging around for something they know they left somewhere, but turns out to be hidden behind some other item? It'll be just like today, when you spend two hours looking for you checkbook, wondering if you accidentally threw it out, and finally find it had fallen under your old hiking boots in the closet. I get quite enough 3D at home, thank you. I think I'll pass on using it for my windowing manager.
Add to this that, in the absence of 3D goggles, everything in 3D is going to appear annoyingly false. And while I bet goggles will be amazing for games and certain specific applications, I don't want my day-to-day working environment to gratuitiously throw in an extra dimension I don't need. It's just one more thing to keep track of. And at the risk of sounding like an old man, the sample screen shot looks like something that would give me a massive headache if I had to deal with it all day.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Wasn't there a window manager for X called Synapse that worked in 3D? It allowed all sorts of nifty things like displaying information on both sides of a window.
Can you believe it that was OpenOffice.org in the screenshot, and not Sun's own StarOffice.
The way I see it even Sun knows the future is in Opensource, after all it is their advanced software lab using openoffice instead of staroffice.
Signature? why do I need such a silly thing. If It makes me think, I don't want one.
Ely Alvarado If you remember a nice signature imagine it here
From the Looking Glass project page:
"What if windows were translucent so you could see the multiple windows you're working on at the same time? What if you could tack a note to yourself right on the Web page you're viewing? What if your CD or movie database became a 3D jukebox, where titles were joined with images to make finding what you want easier than ever?"
Could those "What ifs" be less exciting?
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
The GUI of InGen's Site B computer in the otherwise execrable book of "The Lost World" was something similar. Needless to say, the kids figured it out where the adults failed.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Looking at this, I can't help but wonder, how do they intend to handle the blurriness and uneven pixel distortion that inevitably results from matrix transformations on bitmaps?
If you're on a mac running panther (like me) you can see this with Expose -- basically, when you take a window and shrink it it *will* look a little blurry -- particularly if the shrinkage is such that the window is only shrunken by a small amount, say, 90% original size -- you don't get a clear mapping of pixels, so you get weirdnesses. That's fine for uses like expose when you're not interacting with a window's widgets (you're only picking the window itself) -- but if I'm to actually work with a transformed window we had better have a display system that really acts in transformed space, rather than simply mapping a 2D bitmap.
As much as I dislike MS, and as vaporous as Aero is or whatever-its-called-this-week, it seems like MS is investing into some new kind of display mechanism -- and if it really is vector based and all that hoohah then it probably could skip the render-into-a-bitmap phase and instead draw directly into a transformed gl context, sorry , direct3d of course.
Anyway, I'll happily admit I'm short on technical details. If anybody knows anything enlightening, please, enlighten me. This is a *real* problem. You can't just transform a bitmapped window and expect people to be able to comfortably read it or interact with it.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
I've seen these 3D interfaces like the screenshot linked from the article before, but the filesystems doesn't look very spectacular... it looks like a poor 3D Excel chart that doesn't show any informative relationship or correlation of data. As far as displaying file and folder sizes go, it seems like 2D pie charts work well enough (there are several apps that do this).
Even if a 3D interface was used, a large amount will still have to be 2D, because that's the best way to display text. 3D doesn't automatically mean better. Many things would be best left as 2D, especially text.
IIRC there was a 3D Windows explorer shell replacement before. Can't remember what that was called...
Not really 3D, but the OS X "genie" window minimizing effect is pretty cool.
In Japan I've seen animated desktop icons, which could have 3D animation.
3D space is best for first person shooting games where you want the excitement of exploration (as opposed to a simple 2D map and easily exterminating bad guys by point-and-click instead of point-and-shoot).
But when it comes to GUIs, usefulness is key. A 3D interface would have to have some additional usefulness over a 2D interface to the user, not just being a good tech showcase for Sun.
I think a 3D first person shooter anti-spam / anti-virus software might be cool, but it'll mostly be frivolous bells and whistles, and more of an attempt to trick the user into thinking they are playing a game as opposed to doing a real task.
Your mind has a contradiction, since it's well-know now in neuroscience that the brain is massively parallel, yet consciousness itself at any point in time is mostly serial and unaware of the great bulk of stuff that is being unconsciously attended to. Yet, consciousness can use parallelism - as when we focus on an issue, then put it on the "back burner," only to come back to it hours or days later and find that we now "suddenly" have a solution. So the "virtual" scope of consciousness extends into areas which are presently unconscious - yet still active, and still ultimately accessible by consciousness.
Your consciousness is already a bit like a two-dimensional, small window into a large three-dimensional space - which is just what Sun is working up here for your monitor. So you already have in your brain "mechanisms" for navigating in such a situation. And this navigation is largely unconscious - we can choose where to focus our attention, but much of the process of "choosing" what comes to the focus of consciousness is itself unconscious. That doesn't mean it's not active, and not part of our intelligence.
We may find ourselves strangely at home in the environment Sun is proposing, able to bring to it some of the "instincts" we use for internal regulation of mind.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
The "videos" link isn't slashdotted atm, and is definitely worth checking out, especially if you're tempted to just rant how "quake is a bad interface for writting essays"
What's good about this technology, is that it is just cool/useful enough to use right out of the box with existing OS/WM/applications, but probably does provide a framework to extend and improve programming styles and UI techniques.
I guess its fair to be critical that much of this wasn't invented by Sun, but it doesn't change the point that its been rolled into an apparently useful package.
You know, I'm not sure I've ever quite got the whole desktop metaphor. I've never really seen the point in the desktop itself. Windows, taskbars, menus etc - fine, but why do we need a special window (the desktop) that is always there behind the others but only has limited space?
Most people's desktops just seem to be a rather disorganised collection of shortcuts and temporary documents and people don't seem to get the fact that really this "desktop" is just a view on a folder (I'm talking about non expert users here obviously). It would help if Windows didn't forget where your desktop icons were when you do things like change res, but even so it just seems like a dumping ground.
Why do we need to be able to launch an app from the start menu, the desktop and the quick launch bar? Personally I use the start menu as a list of all the apps I've got plus I make a sub menu of the apps I use fairly regularly. The apps I use everyday go on the quick launch bar. I suppose I could use the desktop in the same way but since I tend to maximise my editor it's handy to have stuff on the taskbar so it doesn't get obscured.
For the same reasons, while I tried 3dtop and it ran nicely, I can't see the point. Maybe if I navigated round all my folders spatially and my files stayed where I put them in that 2d or 3d space I could begin to see the point (although I'd need a digital house maid!). As it stands I find an incontinuity between the spatial desktop and the list based files/folders in a file manager.
Am I missing something?