Collaborating with co-workers in the same office is painful enough, but it’s nigh impossible over a network. Now researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have designed a new system that cleverly blends a video-conference feed with a transparent image of a computer desktop into one full-screen window.
Transparent Desktop Opens Doors
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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i was doing this with tv watching on my ati all in wonder 8500 dv. the feature is called blended desktop.
i was showing it to someone one day and they commented how kewl it would be for video teleconferencing. i am sure that they were not the only person to think of this who tried out that feature of the ati card/ati software.
It’s mostly Quartz that makes this possible. Wired whould do a story on how Apple has made this possible, not just give credit to some people who can use Apple’s great OS.
Although the finger apparatus is cool, I would be annoyed to have to look through a moving translucent image of the person I am video-conferencing with. Why not just white board the desktop instead? The picture of the other user is over my entire desktop irrelevant to me. Keep them in a box!
What an awsome idea! Same to you Ophidian if you really did think of it too.
Well, the article does say:
“The system is implemented in Mac OS X and is made possible largely by the system’s Quartz rendering engine, which can make any part of the interface transparent. Thanks to Quartz, a quick prototype was whipped up in about 45 minutes, Smith said.”
I also liked this quote:
“The system is fairly inexpensive; it has been implemented on a pair of Apple PowerBooks and two $100 FireWire cameras. So far it has been tested only on Ethernet networks and not the Internet, though the researchers say there’s no reason it shouldn’t work just fine. They are also trying to hook it to Apple’s iChat instant-message/video-conferencing software and other similar systems.”
Just goes to show you how powerful Apple hardware and Quartz can be.
Yeah, I feel pretty dumb for not thinking of that myself. You know, it seems like this could be even easier than in-person collaboration for some kinds of computer-based projects. I want to learn how one might grab a part of this –get some shares or something. Then again, maybe there will be a FOSS version in a little while eh?
Additionally, interface translucensy has been available in Windows since w2k.
“Additionally, interface translucensy has been available in Windows since w2k.”
So people keep saying but why is it never used practically like it is in osx?
That question should be aimed at the Microsoft UI designers and programmers. But the functionality is there. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dn…)
If you want to play with transparent windows on w2k/XP, there’s several free and commercial apps to handle it for you.
try using transparency practically. in reality it just gets in the road. betwenn trying to focus on the front or back screen pluss if text suddenly apears on the same place in the 2 overlapping screens u wont b able to read either one of them it in seperate windows.
Collaborating with co-workers in the same office is painful enough, but it’s nigh impossible over a network.
I thought this is the way most open source / free sw is developed 🙂
chris
So all you OSS zealots…see how bad security flaw is in mozilla, firefox and other clones. Now you should shut yourself up and stop blaiming Microsoft.
It only affects the Windows version of Mozilla
Yeah! Right!
And if you test links like shell:windows or shell:system in Firefox/Mozilla what pops-up?
You guessed! Explorer.
The flaw with mozilla is relegate control to Explorer (which, by the way, has the same behaviour)
Errata:
The flaw with mozilla is that delegates control to Explorer (which, by the way, has the same behaviour).
“So all you OSS zealots…see how bad security flaw is in mozilla, firefox and other clones. Now you should shut yourself up and stop blaiming Microsoft.
It only affects the Windows version of Mozilla
”
no actually it effects the windows platform and all browsers that do not explictly disable the *WINDOWS* functionaily.
>> BTW why doesn’t OS news have this story up yet… biased biased osnews
Oh! Really!
As the flaw has more to do with Windows Security Model than Mozilla’s I guess that saying that it is a security flaw is biased toward Windows, not Linux.
By extension, at worse, OSNews is biased towards Windows, not Linux (which I not believe).
So stop trolling and read the articles before comment.
“So all you OSS zealots…see how bad security flaw is in mozilla, firefox and other clones. Now you should shut yourself up and stop blaiming Microsoft.
It only affects the Windows version of Mozilla
“
A) it only effects the Windows version
B) Mozilla offered several fixes within 48 hours
B1) You can alter the about:config setting to disable the problem
B2) You can download an exstension which will fix the problem
B3) You can download the new builds which don’t have the problem
C) Security problems are rare by comparison on Mozilla vs. IE. IE has had far more security holes (and still does). Recently a Microsoft exec admitted that the new ADODB stream patch doesn’t fix the security problem recently cited by US CERT. It will fix a particular version of the exploit and that is it. The day the patch was release, a security researcher put a web site up that uses a different form of the exploit to demonstrate that the problem is not solved for IE. He can lock your computer up remotely (it is a non-destructive example but it may as well wipe out your HD). Same weakness, exploited differently. MS has yet to fix their problems…Mozilla has fixed their problems.
Personal experience – On IE I had plenty of security problems showing up on a regular basis. As soon as I switched to Firefox (actually it was Phoenix at the time) 2 years ago, I have been problem free.
I am sorry, but the Mozilla folks have been far more security conscious since day one. But go ahead, if you like exposing yourself to computer security threats, feel free.
Hmm… I wonder when we will see this get implemeted in iChat AV. If it is using Quartz, as the article says, it should be relatively easy for Apple to provide an implementation of the same idea in iChat AV. I wouldn’t be surprised if these guys got to collaborate with Apple to integrate this new functionality.
About the fix for Mozilla, there is info from http://www.mozillazine.org on the latest builds, extensions, and manual configs for fixing the problem.
Worse than not new in a “systems” sense, I don’t think the UNC guys are going to try to evaluate the system with user interaction studies, which I’m disappointed by. To read in Wired that it’s going to be patented seems unfair. The technology is really Hiroshi Ishii’s Clearboard concept, which they acknowledge and don’t do much to differentiate from other than implementation platform, which is meaningless in academia. It’s only really meaningful to power users out there, but then again, it’s going to be patented, and certainly not open-sourced.
I would really admire them if they did the hard research, instead of build another dazzling piece of technology just for ooh and aah’ing at.
Eric Tse
A timeline was posted, fully referenced, of how quickly the Mozilla developers repaired the recent shell: exploit.
To sum up, in about a day and a half, all versions of Mozilla had new installers that were secured.
http://www.sacarny.com/blog/index.php?p=104
Now, those IE fanboys out there, lets see MS fix a problem that quickly, expecially since their recent patch of IE doesn’t actually fix the problem.
Eye strain and new slew of workplace disorders, here we come.
I’ve seen a friend with this blended feature with an ati on the windows side. Not related to vid conferencing, but I have a tv tuner and wondered if there was a similar way to do this on the linux side?
Perhaps the reason why we don’t see these things on Windows is because the API’s are too complicated to use. Just getting a thing like the latest used files in place is so easy in OSX but a pain in Windows. I guess that the same problem hinders use of a great technology like translucent windows. Those who think they are worthless have never used a Mac, I guess.
“Then again, maybe there will be a FOSS version in a little while eh?”
DirectFB has done this before. He used MPlayer IIRC. Actually i’ve seen DirectFB is capable of a lot more than merely this. There was a neat presentation on at FOSDEM 2004 on this. DirectFB.org’s website might also show it on screenshots, the feature list is also impressive, and the source is on the website.
Freedesktop.org is also capable of doing this (and more), and the stable release will be released on 25 august. After that it’s merely a matter of a fine hierarchy where the programs use the libraries.
I don’t know if it was earlier possible with Amigas or SGIs.
Since a program on TV regulary have an overlay of a symbol or text (TV station symbol, subtitles) i think this is somewhat useful to use a computer real-time for this purpose. At least the possibility is there.
DirectFB has done this before. He used MPlayer IIRC. Actually i’ve seen DirectFB is capable of a lot more than merely this. There was a neat presentation on at FOSDEM 2004 on this. DirectFB.org’s website might also show it on screenshots, the feature list is also impressive, and the source is on the website.
No DirectFB does nothing like this. Did you even read the article? The article is not talking about “Transparency in the desktop” it is talking about a collaborative video conferencing technology.
You really should read the article not just the heading and comments.