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3D Window Manager
xmda pointed us to a website for 3Dwm which, as the name implies, strives to be a 3d window manager for X. They talk about hardware that it might be useful with, and show some screenshots. It looks very rudimentary, but its a pretty interesting thing none the less. I'm just wondering how long with have a good 3d display and 3d input device that would make this really fly. And for that matter, will flatland be better for coding anyway?
I think 3D can be usefull for some things. Lot's of research goes into human interfaces and factors. One thing 3D could do, for instance, is to "push back" or "fold away", applications which were being used less. Say you have 5 windows open, but only are using 2 of time most of the time...the other 3 slowly move backwards on the z-axis so they cause less clutter. Instead of having "desktops" you could simply have "areas", regions of 3D space housing applications.
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I can see the point of having a 3d windowmanager. I find that 2d windowmanagers get really messy when you open more than say 4 or 5 windows. Basically you have to resort to tricks like virtual desktops or minimizing the windows since the average screen is too small to put more than a few windows next to each other.
A 3d desktop together with some other features could solve this problem. It would for instance also be nice if you would never have to start an application explicitly. Many palm top computers already have this feature and I think it is time to introduce it to the desktop also.
Of course just a enormous plane with flat windows sticking out of it is not very usefull. People are bad at keeping track of more than say 7 or 8 things at the same time. That's why menus are tree like structures (i.e. you don't put your zillion options in one big menu but you use multiple menus and submenus to organize your menuoptions). The same should apply to windowmanagers. I want to be able to organize my windows in a hierarchy. I also want to be able to have one window in multiple places in that hierarchy. A 3d structure could help to organize this.
The screenshots are really cool, though I don't see the point of working in the gimp window while looking at it at an angle of 45 degrees. It is great for finding the window, though.
A 3d windowmanager would also allow for 3d widgets, I didn't see any of those in the screenshots. Now coming up with usefull 3d widgets would really be a smart thing. Implementing them is probably not so difficult.
Jilles
And if they complete it (which I hope they'll do... Hope these images are not just GIMPed up!), it means that the moment the holographic display monitor hits the market, Linux will run it first!
Quick, someone begin coding the drivers! :)
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Check out the screenshots :
l
http://www.oreality.com/synapse/screenshots.htm
to download the demo check out the following :
http://www.oreality.com/synapse/download.html
Erwann
None of this is going to be too useful until we get some good input and output devices to use with it. Think about it, how well does a mouse that moves around in 2d work in a 3d environment?
It works just fine. I know, because I have done it, quite a lot. BTW, don't think of my remarks as criticism - I'm just addressing some common misconceptions about 3D interfaces.
Same with your monitor, it is very limiting in a 3d environment.
Think of your eyes. Close one eye. You can still function perfectly well in a 3D world, right? So, no, a 2D monitor is not limiting in a 3d environment. Your eyes present a 2D map of a 3D world to your brain, the same as a 2D montitor does. The actual limitation is good motion and viewpoint control - this is a software issue much more than a hardware issue.
What we need are gloves and goggles.
Bzzzt. No. Have you ever tried it? You look like a space alien for one thing, the goggles shift around on your head, your hands get sweaty, and your arms give out after a few minutes. To convince yourself of this, try holding your arm straight out in front of you for 5 minutes. Your fingers are also a lot less accurate as positioning devices then you might think, especially without kick-ass force feedback, which won't be out of the labs any time soon.
Then this will become somewhat usefull.
It's going to become useful even without those things. Again, I'm not speculating because I've been using this technology for a few years. Once you've used it you'll find good ol' 2D desktops as restrictive and uninteresting as a green 25x80 text mode display. Probably.
Think of all the desk space you could have. All you have to do is turn your head to a blank area. Don't like where an application is? Grab it with the glove and move it.
Yes, correct. These are reasons why 3D desktops are good. Also consider: no more scroll bars - you just move your point of view instead. For graphs of functions, no need to pick a scale or limits - you just move closer if you want to zoom in, and the graph goes off to infinity if it wants to. For 3D graphs, no need to pick the viewpoint - you pick your own viewpoint, and fly around if you have to, to see the details. No need for zoom in general, for anything, you just move closer and further away.
There aren't really any disadvantages to a 3D interface that won't be solved in time, and by this I mean not very much time, which you might suspect from the screenshots you're looking at. To prove this to yourself, consider that any 3D interface can be turned into a standard 2D interface, e.g., by pointing you directly at a 2D rectangle containing your screen view at a distance that maps texels one-to-one to pixels, and keeping you from moving or turning.
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Of course you run into nameing problems. :)
4Dwm is what SGI uses as the window manager on its Irix systems, fortunatly it is not a true 4D windowmanager, or I'd have to replace my brain with one from a 4 dimentional being (and they're hard to find!) just to use it.
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Unfortunately, I was notified by this thread a bit too late, so I guess this entry is getting a bit stale, but I thought I should post my thoughts here nonetheless.
As many of you might have guessed by now, 3Dwm is a 3D-User-Interface research project at Chalmers Medialab. We're currently in crush-mode, as we're going to host a demonstration of the system on Friday (if you happen to be in the vicinity, be sure to drop by! Check out this page (Swedish only) for more information.), so we're currently putting a lot of time and effort into the system.
I see a lot of concern about 3Dwm just being a fancy way to display plain 2D applications in 3D. This is true. Yet 3Dwm is more of a prototype than a full project, and we will be addressing the questions of fully three-dimensional applications in our current core project, im3D, the Immersion3D User Environment. If you think 3Dwm is cool, then imagine having apps that are built for three dimensions. A modelling program might look like a workshop you may step into and use when designing your 3D-models. Your plain ole' debugger (gdb) might have a fancy 3D-dimensional interface to allow you to look at different threads of execution, stacks and heaps in an intuitive way. The plain 2D-VRML browser is now a gateway into the actual model which allows you to step into and actually explore the world from within.
Well, that's some of the hype, anyway. 3Dwm and im3D is still under heavy development, but we hope to be able to release the code under a fairly free license (as in GPL, but we don't know at this point) and post it for the rest of the community to enjoy. Yes, it helps if you have a CAVE or a HMD, but we'll support (and already do) normal desktop systems as well.
If you have any specific questions, comments, flames or criticism which you really want to make sure reaches us, then mail us at 3dwm@medialab.chalmers.se. Thanks for all your feedback!
None of this is going to be too useful until we get some good input and output devices to use with it. Think about it, how well does a mouse that moves around in 2d work in a 3d environment? Same with your monitor, it is very limiting in a 3d environment.
;)
What we need are gloves and goggles. Then this will become somewhat usefull. Think of all the desk space you could have. All you have to do is turn your head to a blank area. Don't like where an application is? Grab it with the glove and move it. With even more input devices, the implications for pr0n are unthinkable.
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