Sun Microsystems’ Looking Glass has been released for testing. This is a Beta and bugs are expected.
Project Looking Glass Beta Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=7530
Dude, you so totally missed it. The last one had a X11 icon next to it, this one has a Sun logo. OMG, I can’t believe you didn’t see that. J/K. =)
A preview doesn’t necessarily entail BETA status. “Preview” usually infers ALPHA status. Beta is more production-worthy.
I guess I need a new computer, look at those requirements.
Component
Linux Platform
Operating System
Project Looking Glass has been tested on Sun Java Desktop System Release 1 and Release 2, RedHat 9, SuSE Linux 8.1.
CPU
2 GHz or faster recommended
RAM
512Mb
Graphics Card*
3D accelerated graphics card with driver support for OpenGL, version 1.2 or greater.
IMPORTANT! 24bit display depth is required! See instructions below for how to configure this.
Based on what I’ve seen of Looking Glass, it provides some neat eye-candy and it might be fun to play around with (for about 5 minutes), but I don’t think it will actually be very useful. Does anyone actually need to rotate windows, etc? Even at the demo Sun gave, the most interesting use they could find was to rotate a window so you could write a note on the backside of the window….interesting, but it seems to me kind of pointless.
“interesting, but it seems to me kind of pointless.”
this is only a very small step i agree… but at least its a step.. a lot of companies dont want to take steps….
I was just thinking of this point a while ago and i have to draw to the conclusion us humans have got used to learning from 2D perspective.. from reading a book to watching film or typing on a computer..
there does not seem to be too much that we do in 3D these days apart from walking and driving a car.. and anyone who flies helicopters will tell you the difficulties of learning mastering 3D controls..
I hear a lot of people saying its pretty pointless having 3D for computers as we have no applications for it…
The thing is we have had generations of 2Dimentional thoughts and education..
Makes me wonder if creating true 3D spaces apart from reality would help unlock or add to our learning of the world…
I do believe there are as many 3D computer advantages as there are currently 2D but like most things unless your able to explore you wont know…
at the end of the day i could be wrong and there could be no advantages but then what have we humans lost in exploring something new????
The point is that it’s a fun new game! One loads a story about looking glass, and if no one has asked this question, which has been beaten into the ground in every one of these articles, he wins. No one has ever won.
Hyper, no need to take a passive position on Sun.
Looking Glass is a “clean slate” for allowing creative developers to see what they can do for improving the user experience. Its mostly eye candy right now but the goal is for the community to make it into something worthy.
John, I wanna take a passive postion on it..
I dont care to much who moves the GUI or interaction forward but I do believe there are missed opertunities in sticking with the same idea…
I came to this page on wikipedia…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Crown_Victoria
no matter what the technical problems of the 1955 version it still looks much more interesting to drive then the 1992 version..
and they probably share more in common with each other then I care to find out… but in the 50 years or so since the 1955 verson we still have not found a better way of daily traveling… and it all feels a little forced feed..
I see computing is technically moving forward like the car but not willing to break out in other ways..
We’ve been using the 2D interface for about 20 years now. Isn’t it about time we explored and explioted the usability and productivity of the 3D interface for desktop usage, not just for games?
I remember the leap from 2D gaming to 3D gaming. Many people, at the time, argued that 3D gaming was just eye candy. “What is the point of 3D gaming?” they uttered. Today, I’d love to know their opinion.
I just installed Looking Glass on Mandrake 10 and it runs extremely fast and smooth. (Athlon XP 1700+ [that’s 1.45GHz], 512MB RAM and an ATI Radeon 8500 64MB graphics card) One word of warning though, since LG doesn’t officially support Mandrake, when you’re in LG you can’t launch a terminal…I guess because LG doesn’t know the location of any of Mandrake’s terminal applications?? If you can’t launch a terminal, you can’t launch any applications that there aren’t already built-in links to in the LG taskbar…so if you’re running Mandrake LG is pretty useless as a desktop except to look around at it, lauch a couple demo apps and see how it runs.
PLG is DEFINATELY in alpha at the moment.
You can only run about 3 apps and there is little to no functionality at the moment
Its a developer release, not a beta release
As such, its a bit early to be dismissing it as eye candy, if you look on the forum they are basically saying “OK, heres what we’ve got, now give us ideas of what we can do with it, where we can take it”
At the moment it IS just a pretty interface, but the plans are for so much more.
Its a bit like saying a dev version of any OS or desktop environment is just a fancy way of viewing the contents of your drive. Initially, while its being built, it may be, but when its finished…
PLG is DEFINATELY in alpha at the moment.
You can only run about 3 apps and there is little to no functionality at the moment
Its a developer release, not a beta release
As suc
On mandrake, you need to install xterm to be able to lauch a terminal.
urpmi xterm
Hi,
the requirements are set a little high i suppose.
It runs fine on my machine as is:
AMD Duron 1200 MHz,
768 MB RAM
SuSE 9.1 Professional
GeForce4 Ti
comrad
The point of LG is a new style of desktop UI
We have added functionality to the original Mac GUI but in essance it behaves the same now as it did then…
If a new style UI can become popular on linux/unix it wont be long b4 the big companies like MS and Apple start incoperating components of it
LG has potential, the question is are we (the user) willing to change UI right now?
I am still sorting out j2sdk1.5 on my system but all I can say is woah, its hit a release this should be cool. Although I do have to admit the system specs do seem a bit high.
Im glad it was done.. Not everyone may see the point, but its different to whats out there and that aint a bad thing. People cant claim oh “its just a rip off”, There has been 3d work done before, however this *is different* and it has hit public release (even as a developer build) which is nothing short of brilliant.
Other funny thing is Ive noticed someone else has taken my nick name :/ tis a shame..
I didn’t see in the req’s and I didn’t do a lot of searching, but can I not play with this on a sun box, running slowaris?
Just imagine if you could use this instead of Powerpoint to make presentations of your product
I installed xterm in Mandrake 10 and now LG launches it as its terminal application…but in full screen mode Looking Glass doesn’t accept any keyboard input at all!
i think looking glass has a lot of potential…and i ee no reason to judge it without even haing it as a final release…..or at leat beta
LG is a great project, and it’s the perfect type of technology to open source as I think it will allow for a lot of experimentation in the UI space. As has been mentioned before, the desktop metaphor and the 2D visualization for UIs have seen little real innovention for the past decades. Now, we could argue that it’s because we’ve reached the optimal model for UIs at this point, but I think we all know that’s not true.
A lot of people are looking at this project and saying, “yeah, but what good is an xterm in 3D space”. That was my first impression 🙂 Showing 2D apps in the 3D environment is not the most important part of this project, more interesting is the space where you build a real 3D UI in this environment. Lots of work still needs to be done, here, and the sample 3D app that comes with LG is not that great (the very limited “CD” viewer). But this area is the one that has great potential.
BTW, for Windows users, you can kind of run looking glass in “development” mode. Unfortunately, you won’t see any of your window apps in the environment, only the LG native 3D apps.