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LiveCD Lets You Try Out Project Looking Glass

Posted by timothy on from the slick-interface dept.

remember_beos writes "Sun created Project Looking Glass (LG3D) as a 'proof of concept' not long ago. It is an environment for Linux, like KDE or Gnome, but with some really great 3D functionality. More than just eye-candy, LG3D provides functional use of an extra spatial dimension on your desktop. Now there is a LiveCD for us all to try it out."

14 of 397 comments (clear)

  1. Worth it? by Kimos · · Score: 3, Insightful

    To me this says all show and no productivity. I'll get a live CD and play with it, but I doubt it'll be worth using to actually get something accomplished.

    Isn't it rough on the video card to have it 3D rendering at any point the the OS is loaded?

    1. Re:Worth it? by DavidLeblond · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I don't know, ask Apple. Their UI uses the GPU and it has for awhile now.

    2. Re:Worth it? by Kimos · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Maybe I'm remembering back in the day of my first "good" video card. I was running rendered screen savers (cause it was uber-cool at that point) and the card was having heat issues. Guess things have changed eh?

    3. Re:Worth it? by Mark_MF-WN · · Score: 3, Insightful
      You're making the totally unreasonable assumption that the video card would keep everything in its own memory, all the time. Video games don't do this and neither would a 3D windowing system.

      UIs are fantastically simple compared to games. They rarely contain more than a few thousand screen elements, only a small fraction of which are active at any time.

      Have you noticed that XWindows (as it stands now) can easily handle dozens of windows without depleting main memory? I have 18 maximized windows running right now at 1280x1024x32 resolution. Guess how much main memory X is using? 27MB -- rather than the 90MB your naive calculations would suggest. And I can activate any one of those windows so quickly that I don't perceive the time it takes to drag the windows contents up from the swap space.

      You don't seem to really understand how graphics systems work. The only things that need to take up video card memory are the pixels visible on screen. ANYTHING else in video memory is there simply to speed things up a little and take the burden off of the system bus. UI elements rarely change, most of them aren't visible, most of them aren't animated, and most of them are so ridiculously simple that the video cards texture compression algorithms (available on EVERY video card manufactured since 1998) can squeeze them down to practically nothing. UIs can afford much higher latencies than the 60fps necessary to convincingly render a video game.

      I could go on and on. The point is, UIs are painfully, appallingly simple from a 3D standpoint. That's why people want to windowing to the video card in the first place. Any video card that can handle Quake2 can eat the most complex GUI imaginable for breakfast.

  2. I dunno.... by Psykus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I tried something similar for Windows XP some time ago, I didn't really see any advantages over using a normal, 2D interface. Perhaps this 3D interface is different, but the whole thing seems pretty gimicky to me. Kind of like having a 3D interface, just to say you have a 3D interface, not because of any inherent benefits of using it.

    Also, is this a window manager akin to Gnome or KDE, or does it run on top of either one? The window decorations and stuff look pretty fugly IMHO.

    1. Re:I dunno.... by suckmysav · · Score: 3, Insightful

      " I just thought of a way this might be made useful. It depends on sensing the location of the user's head. It would work so that a user could tilt his head like he's trying to see 'around' to the other side of the spherical interface and the window manager would rotate in the windows/information from that side. So if you are looking at a text editor and need to check out a document momentarily you could crane your neck (I'm talking a slight gesture, not really craning, but the same motion) and the web browser that is pushed off to the side would slide back in. "

      And the first thing a new user would do would be to get on the internet to find out how they can turn that goddamn crap off.

      Sheesh. The last thing I want to do when using a PC is to have to ensure that I remain absolutely motionless lest my GUI start flipping windows all over the place.

      I suggest you pitch that idea to the folks at Redmond ASAP. It might be just what we need to start turning people away from their Windows boxen in droves.

      --
      "You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
  3. Re:Conflict of interest by UWC · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Sun sells servers. Hosting a torrent would set an example which in the long run could lead to fewer servers sold.

    And having their own servers Slashdotted sets a better example?

    --
    Honor Among Slackers. A veri
  4. Value not yet realized? by Eric+Savage · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I couldn't get the video, but from the screenshots and other stuff I've seen I don't see anyone making a compelling case for this. I admit it has promise, but I don't see any examples of actual utility that cannot also be found in just having two or three monitors. Right now it just seems like eye candy and an interesting concept the developers are waiting for someone else to capitalize on, not a viable alternative to the current 3D (e.g. stacked windows) desktop paradigm.

    --

    This is not the greatest sig in the world, this is just a tribute.
  5. Honest /. recommendation by miketang16 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    After reading about 15 requests for a torrent, I got to thinking about the /. effect and bittorrent.

    Wouldn't it be a decent idea to set up a torrents.slashdot.org and if possible, before releasing a story with a large 'attachment', set up a torrent for it?

    Then again, I don't know how hard this would be logistically, considering that one must obtain a copy of the file ahead of time. However, IMHO I think it's worth a shot.

    --
    -------
    "In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
    -- George Orwell
    1. Re:Honest /. recommendation by miketang16 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      As for the faq question about creating a site cache, this would be quite different since it's not taking away from any adspace revenue based on the site because you would only be sharing a file that that site is distributing. People would still visit the site to read the information, but the bandwidth needs for a large file hosted on the site would be distributed.

      An argument might be that if you give readers a direct link to the file, then they won't visit the site. However, /. already posts direct HTTP/FTP links in its stories. Also, people that only want the file are just going to read the replies anyway to look for a direct link or torrent.

      --
      -------
      "In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
      -- George Orwell
  6. Managing the location and size of Windows by Peaker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    is counter-productive.

    Managing their rotation axis and depth is more waste of time.

    Windows should either be auto-maximized or auto-tiled by the windowing system, with the user and application cooperating to define which parts in the visible output of the application are important to the user at every given moment so that those are automatically displayed to the user. Simple example: Newly created messages about errors or events should not be placed on top of some text I am reading, but on some of the all-gray or all-white area that the screen almost always contains. For this to happen, it must know that text is more important than "dead" areas that contain nothing.

    This silliness of attributing physical traits to non-physical entities is counter-productive, even if it is very visually appealing.

    Lets let go of the overlapping windows crap and solve the division of screen-space problem in a more intelligent way.

  7. Re:Finally... the wait is over by jericho4.0 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Seeing as there is a lot of interest in this thing, and you're the only one who's seen it, can you either post a torrent or expound on what was lacking ?

    --
    "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
  8. Looking Glass is nausea inducing by NeedleSurfer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    this is not a flame but a real comment, all videos I watched of this gave me nausea, the idea that the background move when my mouse does is very disturbing and not a good idea to locate items on the screen since everything moves not just the foreground or background. Each graphical element is way too big and actually nulify the idea, if you wanted more space out of this realize you don't because every object on the screen is now bigger, turning them aside doesn't provide much more space than windowshading does (the ability on the mac to collapse a window into its title bar), actually it provide less space because of the drop shadow and extra thickness, plus, now, you have too read from up to down instead of left to right, basically it is less usefull and more clunky than windowshade, but since it is a feature of a software that runs on Linux people will go nuts over it and call it usefull 3D even if its nothing but glitz and wizzbang...

    Actually, Looking glass is like when you give Windows a resolution the display can't handle, it just shows you part of your desktop and now you have to scroll the desktop to go to each corner, imagine this concept in 3D, you have Looking Glass...

  9. Re: TORRENT ISO IS BROKEN - DONT WASTE YOUR TIME by jgaynor · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The title pretty much says it all - even if the above link works you're going to spend the next 4 hours downloading a shiny new drink coaster.