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20040703 Saturday July 03, 2004

3D Desktop Just Eye Candy?

Commenting on Project Looking Glass, my friend Amy Wohl is quoted being dismissive:

Looking Glass is a desktop project that converts the user's screen into a 3-D space, giving the user the ability to rotate from front to rear around the objects in that space. Amy Wohl, editor of "Amy Wohl Opinions," a technology trends newsletter, said, "I'm not sure Looking Glass is anything more than eye candy."

While I can understand this perspective, I regard it as uncharacteristically shallow. I think it's more than eye-candy, for several reasons.

  • I attended the (packed) Community Meeting and was struck by the enthusiasm and diversity of the attendees as Hideya and his colleagues took the thing apart technically and showed their intent. In particular, it became apparent that this could easily turn into the open source community programming for the new auto-stereo monitors that are becoming available.
  • There are some great ease-of-use innovations in there - some example:
    • putting modal dialogs on the back of the window they relate to so the blocked window and the dialog can't get out of order
    • zooming out to navigate the virtual desktop intutitively
    • stacking views on edge and moving them with others in their family, strengthening the visual association and making additional navigation actions less necessary
    To me those are all the sort of ideas that Apple's Expose is heading towards and nothing like the questionably useful 3D environments to which Project Looking Glass is often compared.
  • Most tellingly, there's a mode in the Longhorn previews that copies the idea of Project Looking Glass even to the extent of look-alike wall-paper! The Borg is watching.

My feeling about Project Looking Glass is that it might just be the seed of the revolution that brings the Linux desktop out ahead of its competitors. I'd agree it's 'eye-candy' but I'll not use the word 'just'...

Posted by webmink ( Jul 03 2004, 08:32:39 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]
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Comments:

Sun Mink,

See my blog at http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/dbaigent/20040614 for an overview of the "not just eye candy" features of Looking Glass. And don't forget - ain't nothing wrong with eye candy :-)

Posted by Dan Baigent on July 03, 2004 at 11:42 AM PDT #

I think that the key to success will be to ensure that it's a seamless evolution from the existing experience, metaphor, etc. I remember back in the late 20th century a number of 3D UI proposals, built around things like VRML (and even the "Doom" engine). The problem was that "flying through document space" was just too weird for most peole to grok.

Posted by Geoff Arnold on August 03, 2004 at 08:49 AM PDT #

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