Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 20th Dec 2006 21:20 UTC, submitted by mkools
Project Looking Glass has hit the magical 1.0 mark: "This release is the culmination of 3 years of work, starting with Hideya san who originally conceived of a bold, new type of window system, through the initial shake down of the proof-of-concept demo by an internal Sun community, followed by the open sourcing of the technology, which generated such enormous interest that it brought down the java.net servers several times. From that point on many people from around the globe have contributed to the project; contributing to the core, contributing applications, performing testing, writing and translating documentation, etc. The project owners (Hideya, Paul, Krishna and myself) are very grateful for all of the great contributions we have received from you, the LG community."
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Member since:
2005-06-29
3d desktops exist to take advantage of 3d hardware (which has been developing quickly for 10 years while 2d hardware has stalled completely). In order to sell them you add a few glitzy affects and tell the marketing department its "3d" so they can excite people over it.
It offers you:
1. An interface that eats fewer CPU cycles (if done correctly).
2. An interface that allows a better drawing paradigm for programmers (no double buffering necessary, if you're willing to ditch backward compatibility).
3. Affects such as expose which allow users to quickly view things that won't actually fit on their desktop without using icons and summary text.
4. Something for that 3d card you bought (you can't really get around it anymore) to do.
5. Better video playback capability (gl instead of one video on hardware and the rest not).
But I agree that a 3 dimensional interface makes no sense on a 2 dimensional screen, however, you don't need 3d hardware to make a 3d interface.