Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Martinus on August 31, 2005, 10:45:01 am
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[color=66ff00]Given the fact that more and more companies (except MS) are realising that a 3D accellerated GFX card is an awful thing to waste there's a tendency to try and push the next big thing in the desktop world.
I've seen the window manager in OSX, with it's rather nifty ability to zoom out from a bunch of windows and zoom back in on the one you select but I think SUN has really pushed the envelope: Realplayer vid (//webcast-east.sun.com/ramgen/archives/GSN-1312/GSN-1312_01_225.rm)
The thing I'm most pleased about is that this is open archetecture so you might bee seeing it on a linux box soon, or sometime later on a windows box when MS get around to copying it.
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Nice dig on Microsoft. But the upcoming graphics system in Vista (and will be backported to XP) utilizes the 3D card to a greater degree than even OSX does.
Didn't know about Sun though but Solaris was always pretty nice.
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Originally posted by ChronoReverse
Nice dig on Microsoft. But the upcoming graphics system in Vista (and will be backported to XP) utilizes the 3D card to a greater degree than even OSX does.
Didn't know about Sun though but Solaris was always pretty nice.
[color=66ff00]As has been widely accepted 'Microsoft does not innovate, it emulates'.
Anyhow it wasn't a dig as such as I have no great dislike for MS, it was just a fact: if this technology is liked then MS will at some later point copy it and insert it into Win* a la tabs in IE7.
Also using the GFX card to handle 2D graphics is all good and well but we've been using the same overall design paradigm for GUI's for a long time now. To see one of the larger companies with a bit of muscle (programming and cashflow), backing an innovative idea and not putting a pricetag on it is rather nice.
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I'm not touching a real vid, annoying its even used in such manner.
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[color=66ff00]I used to be the same Fury, but Real player alternative (www.free-codecs.com/download/Real_Alternative.htm) is light, unobtrusive and can be removed anytime you feel like it.
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Very nice stuff. I wonder if the JavaAPI will include this kind of functionality for JRE windows. (or frames within those windows I should say)
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If Windows Media Classic with ffdshow does not play it, I don't need it. :p
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[color=66ff00]Actually WMC with real alternative shows it, it's a codec not a player.
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Real Alt is a codec for WMC anyway ya bell-end. :p
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It never ceases to amaze me that people will wall themselves off from media, purely because they've grown bull headed about the application used to display it :p
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Real is not common enough to warrant installing any other codecs besides ffdshow, which handles the most common video and audio formats. If they really HAVE to use a cross-platform streaming media, then they should use quicktime which is very common and warrants installing quicktime. Real is just bleh in every possible way.
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Nice, I've seen some screenshots of an eralier version of this, with a full 360 environment.
One of the most interesting thing was that network connections are represented as portals, through which you could see the "desktop" of another user and then go trough it. You saw other users represented as avatars, with line-of-sight representing where they were looking at (=where their mouse cursor was).
I'm looking forward to a Linux version of this.
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Originally posted by Maeglamor
[color=66ff00]As has been widely accepted 'Microsoft does not innovate, it emulates'.
Anyhow it wasn't a dig as such as I have no great dislike for MS, it was just a fact: if this technology is liked then MS will at some later point copy it and insert it into Win* a la tabs in IE7.
Also using the GFX card to handle 2D graphics is all good and well but we've been using the same overall design paradigm for GUI's for a long time now. To see one of the larger companies with a bit of muscle (programming and cashflow), backing an innovative idea and not putting a pricetag on it is rather nice.
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Quite true.
Interestingly, Bill Gates has done interviews where he blatantly acknowledges Apple's innovation as its competitive advantage. In fact, he's been a valiant supporter of MSFT products for Apple when they struggled as a manufacturer. One can make the argument (poorly, albeit) that Microsoft's continued support of Office for Apple products during the lean years staved the company's death. Now that Apple has moved into consumer electronics, the dependence is less important. Gates also acknowledges that they look to Apple as an incubator for innovation which they then incorporate into their own products. This is all well documented. That makes Gates smart - why reinvent the wheel? For what? Microsoft doesn't seek to innovate - for better or worse - they seek to dominate. Apple is good at what it does, and thus far, Microsoft has been good at what it does.
In any case, I personally don't feel a 3D interface isn't as great as it could be until we have cheap consumer level 3D displays and hardware interfaces. We simply think in 2D most of the time.
What I think would be neat would be an interface in the spirit of the one in Minority Report; multiple onscreen input + voice.
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3D desktops (beyond merely taking advantage of 3D hardware to speed up 2D rendering) are another example of 'noisy, flashy crap'.
Unnecessary and ultimately a waste of time. Manoeuvering in 3D is more time-consuming than locating an object on a 2D screen.
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I've tried using some Shareware 3D Desktop apps, but they are either so convoluted that they are incapable of being anything other than an interactive screen saver, or buggy as hell. I used one call the 'Orb' I think, it allowed to you place icons in a 360' arc 'around' you monitor and rotate your view. I was forever losing icons :(
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I thinks its an interesting idea, but I also think that after the novelty of having the '360 degrees, realtime 3d, explore desktop with portals and crap' wears of you'll be left with an impractical and likely confusing desktop.
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Originally posted by Maeglamor
[color=66ff00]As has been widely accepted 'Microsoft does not innovate, it makes it better[/color]
Fixed.
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Only if you mean in the same way you get dogs fixed.
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I love it when people do that. They "fix" things people say, and I guess that leaves them with an excuse to not back it up at all. Not just this thread, but people seem to like to do that lately. Well...none of the older members.
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Originally posted by Solatar
I love it when people do that. They "fix" things people say, and I guess that leaves them with an excuse to not back it up at all. Not just this thread, but people seem to like to do that lately. Well...none of the older members.
Alright, then. I don't see you making any legitimate excuse as to why your preferred OS is any better than Windows. Jackass.
Windows' user interface is better than Macs. Unless I'm much mistaken, GUIs first came out on Apple computers, correct?
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[color=66ff00]Windows interface is not only poorer than OSX, MS's leading edge design is poorer than OSX.
link (www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winvista_beta1_vs_tiger_01.asp)
Now accounting for the fact that Vista is in beta you still can't say that the win interface is better because apple is currently improving it's already superior GUI with each release.
Now I consider Linux's GUI as a double edged sword of sorts, it's both as flexible as you want and as inconsistent as all hell. It needs serious improvement and as the video I linked to suggests it may well be coming in the near future.
Why the unnecessary windows fanboi stance? As I said before I value windows as a good OS but it's nowhere near as polished as OSX or as flexible as linux. There are certain things you need windows for though and that's why it's valued.
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Is Vista the blue/green interface that came with XP? I wasn't referring to that; I was referring to "Windows Classic," as in how Windows 98 looked. Also, I wasn't even really referring to looks at all. I was referring to how it's set up.
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Getting back on topic a bit here...
Some parts of that demonstration were pretty cool to look at, at least. I don't understand why he made such a big deal about the transparency; programs like Winamp or Trillian already do that without any need for anything complex. I'll have to say that the rotating windows were amazing, and when he started writing a note on the back of a webpage...that was awesome. :D Overall, though, there doesn't seem to be much purpose for the whole thing. As Descenterace said, the monitor is a 2D environment, and cluttering it up with all kinds of 3D interfaces can get overwhelming really fast. I also don't see the point of directing so many graphical resources just toward the desktop display; it's all well and good if you have the latest graphics card, but for someone like me, it'd make my machine run slower than an Amiga. :p I got the same reaction after using OSX Tiger for the first time yesterday; all of the graphical flashiness just seems extraneous to what you're actually using the machine for. Windows 95 still looks fine to me. :p I'll take back everything I just said, though, if someone develops interactive holographic desktops or Ghost-in-the-Shell-style mental interfaces; if we get to that point, bring on the 3D! :D
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3d accelleration to make your 2d desktop run faster and smoother? BLOODY BEAUTIFUL.
3d Desktops? BLOODY AWFUL.
Look, as long as your interface to the computer consists of a mouse (which is, essentially a 2d device) and a keyboard and your display is a screen (a 2d device), 3d desktops are going to suck donkey bollocks. Every single way you can describe a 3d desktop maps directly to a 2d display with virtual desktops--which have been about and working at decent speeds since the days of the 386. Making it 3d only makes it less efficient, harder to find things, and more confusing for anyone who isn't a geek.
Before anyone even contemplates switching to 3d "desktops" (even the word "Desktop" is mired in 2d thinking!), a full on 3d input and display system is required. Even then, applications that need 3d displays and input need to be created. Everyone and their brother isn't hacking on something in Lightwave, but you'd be hard pressed to find someone who didn't use IE, Word, Excel, and the like.
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Originally posted by vyper
Real Alt is a codec for WMC anyway ya bell-end. :p
:confused: :p
Originally posted by ChronoReverse
Nice dig on Microsoft. But the upcoming graphics system in Vista (and will be backported to XP) utilizes the 3D card to a greater degree than even OSX does.
To me, that speaks of 'bloat'. I don't care if my menus have pixel shading and crap, I care if it doesn't get in the way.
Not to mention, if bump-mapped Windows require people to upgrade their video card, that seems a little absurd.
I do think the days of nearly-all 2D interfaces are numbered. But, ironically, I don't think I can watch the video because I only have xine - no "real" anything. It's a piece of **** anyways.
I think 3D GUIs will only really come into style once we have readily-available 3D displays and/or interfaces. Whipping out a pair of goggles and doing operations on a virtual desk sounds like it could be handy, but hardly anyone has the money to afford such a thing. There's also the social stigma (and God/diety of your choice/Darwinism help us when people start using them while driving, ala cell phones)
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Originally posted by WMCoolmon
Whipping out a pair of goggles and doing operations on a virtual desk sounds like it could be handy, but hardly anyone has the money to afford such a thing.
Its worse than that. Let's try a little exercise:
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- push yourself back from your computer and sit up straight.
- lift your arms up and make lots of motions like you were using a computer in thin air
- keep doing this for the three hour stretch (on average) that most people spend using a computer every day
- suddenly realize why fully 3d interfaces are a dumb idea
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Originally posted by vyper
Real Alt is a codec for WMC anyway ya bell-end. :p
Real Alternative is a codec for Windows. Windows Media Classic CAN use it, but neither is needed for the other to work. I use RA in Windows Media Player.
WMCoolman, WMC is Windows Media Classic, not a reference to you.
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Making 3D GUI's is generally not going to work. People understand 2d flat planes. While the human mind is pretty good at dealing with 3D environments (we live in one) we're still pretty rooted in 2D thinking...the ground is down, the sky is up, and everything exists along that plane. The rest are just details.
So a GUI that operates in pure 3D is probably not going work. Not with conventional methods. Never say never I guess.
But 3D acceleration to make the 2D interface smoother, cleaner, and faster is a good idea and one that I applaud.
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Re, WMC: I realized that, hence the :p
As for three hours of waving arms around, it's not so much that, as you could sit down anywhere and use a virtual mouse + keyboard + move windows around with intuitive movements. For modelling you could actually grab things and move them around in 3 dimensions at a time rather than just 2.
There would be the lack of tactile feedback and physical exhaustion, yeah, but it'd still be more convenient than bringing out an entire laptop, especially if it were possible to be discreet about it.
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While the "3D floating windows" idea sounds fairly useless (e.g. virtual desktops are much better than stacking windows sideways), using 3d hardware to improve the desktop is pretty cool. It's more useful than you might imagine.
Here's a blurb about it from Jon Smirl (He used to do a lot of work on Xgl, an Xserver built on OpenGL). From: http://dri.freedesktop.org/~jonsmirl/graphics.html
Using 3D for the desktop is not just about making more eye candy. A lot of the 3D generated eye candy may just be glitz but there are also valid reasons for using 3D. 3D is simply faster than 2D, no one is making their 2D functions faster, all of silicon engineering is going into 3D. You can do fast, arbitrary image processing for things like color space conversion, stretching/warping, etc. I’ve seen some extremely complex filtering done in real time with shader hardware that would take the main CPU several seconds a frame to do. Support for heterogeneous window depths (simultaneous 8, 16, 24-bit windows) with arbitrary colormaps. On-the-fly screen flipping/rotation for projectors, and whole-screen scaling for the visual impaired, etc. Resolution independence allows objects to be rendered at arbitrary resolution/size and down/up-sampled when shown on-screen. More interesting applications are described later in the windowing section.
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This 3D interface seems to be useless. It would be cool for about five minutes, after which it would just get obtrusive. I hope Vista retains the option of using the classic 98/2000 scheme with no animations, which is simple enough that it isn't going to benefit much from 3D acceleration anyway.
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Originally posted by WMCoolmon
Re, WMC: I realized that, hence the :p
As for three hours of waving arms around, it's not so much that, as you could sit down anywhere and use a virtual mouse + keyboard + move windows around with intuitive movements. For modelling you could actually grab things and move them around in 3 dimensions at a time rather than just 2.
Modelling is completely, utterly NICHE.
As for the rest, describe to me a more intuitive movement for moving a window around than using the mouse. Almost anything you can think of that IS intuitive maps 1:1 directly to "move mouse pointer to window, grab the window, drag the window, release the window".
Originally posted by WMCoolmon
There would be the lack of tactile feedback and physical exhaustion, yeah, but it'd still be more convenient than bringing out an entire laptop, especially if it were possible to be discreet about it.
Stand in the library and start typing in midair one of these days. Keep it up for about half an hour. Let's see how unubtrusive you are. ;)
3d interfaces can't be made practical without changing the entire "desktop" metaphor. As long as we think in terms of "windows" and "files" and "folders" and "desktops" and the like, you're not going to find anything that will beat a mouse and a keyboard for manipulating those concepts.
I'm seriously not trying to come across as an ass, its just that the man/computer interface is one of those things I take great interest in. I get a little worked up about it.
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[color=66ff00]I can honestly say that I'm mostly excited about this because of the effort to try and implement something outside of the box. I also think it's a bit preemptive to draw any conclusions without any hands-on experience.
A good example to me is the ability to use keyboard shortcuts or the mouse, a lot of people are mouse only, I'm sure the majority of people use both and a few use keyboard pretty much exclusively. People tend to find a method of working with a computer that they like because there's some flexibility there.
I guess linux allows you the freedom to use whatever features of whatever GUI's you want. I use xfce4 with some KDE components like konsole, konqueror and kbluetooth. As I said before it's not flawless but it's nice to have options.
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Originally posted by Maeglamor
[color=66ff00]I can honestly say that I'm mostly excited about this because of the effort to try and implement something outside of the box. I also think it's a bit preemptive to draw any conclusions without any hands-on experience.
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But we've had hands on experience. There's dozens of 3d desktop ideas out there. All of them suffer from a lack of supporting hardware or a prevailing reason for using them.
And its not out-of-the-box thinking, either: Since the advent of 3d graphics accellerators, people have been compositing 2d graphics onto a texture buffer and then projecting that in 3d space as a texture on a polygon. We've seen entire games based around using 3d graphics to simulate 2d (MarioRPG for the Gamecube comes to mind). Vista's just the first case of Microsoft doing it in the GUI of their OS.
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Originally posted by Kalfireth
It never ceases to amaze me that people will wall themselves off from media, purely because they've grown bull headed about the application used to display it :p
no it's nothing to do with bullheadedness
Real Media pushes snoopware and bloatware - RealPlayer is a piece of bloated spyware, the format is lossy as hell and anyone who knows their ass from a hole in the ground would be using something under ffdshow
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yeah, but RealMedia is great for Internet streaming pr0n. I know all my favorite sites use Real Media. ;)
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IF someone wants to convert it into a usable format, be my guest...I'd be very appreciative of a DivX or something so I can see what it actually *is* :p
Although it's probably on google somewhere.
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RV9 is considered by most on the Doom9 forums to be at least as good as XviD and for some media (particularly animation) to be even superior.
Of course, it's weighed down with licensing and such as well as being a propietory format. But the Helix DNA it's not based on is pretty much what you'd call open-source.
In any case, unless you were on Linux, it's not a screaming problem to play it back even if you don't want to use Real's players and codecs. And RealAlternative isn't even the only method.
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It's not a particularly big deal with Linux either. Mplayer supports Real formats.
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Originally posted by ChronoReverse
unless you were on Linux
Bingo. :)
I'm using Ubuntu64, and AFAIK there is no 64-bit realplayer.
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Originally posted by CP5670
[2D desktop] is simple enough that it isn't going to benefit much from 3D acceleration anyway.
Not quite true.
When each window is drawn, the OS has to perform clipping to prevent windows at the back from affecting those at the front. This usually means that painting to a hidden area simply does not happen, so if an app's WndProc thread is doing something else at the time the window is brought to the front, there might be a delay before the newly-visible areas are painted.
Also, bit-blitting across areas of system RAM is slow.
On a 3D card, each window can be handled as a quad. Painting can be done direct to the texture rendered on that quad, stored in video memory, whether or not it's actually visible without incurring any performance hits. The window can be brought forward by changing its Z coordinate.
All clipping would be done by the 3D hardware (on a pixel-by-pixel basis, even) far faster than it could ever be done in software.
Admittedly, all this does require arbitrary-size textures. IIRC modern cards can handle simply massive textures exceeding 2048 by 2048, which should be more than enough.
Best thing is, all this extends nicely to 3D games. How many games hijack the screen, preventing you from minimising their window? If the OS is making them use a framebuffer which is just another window texture, there is nothing preventing them being minimised.
Plus, you won't get those ugly artifacts when something pops up behind your game and starts flickering through the OpenGL window.
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How does it work right now? Whatever Windows uses at the moment seems to work fast enough as long as a video card driver is loaded. (with the classic scheme and animations disabled, not the sluggish default scheme)
Best thing is, all this extends nicely to 3D games. How many games hijack the screen, preventing you from minimising their window?
I've heard of other people running into this issue everywhere, but I actually have only one game with this problem.
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i dont see why windows and other guis done use a accelerated vector based 2d intervace. switching over to vector based fonts and graphics would speed up rendering way over software rendered or bitmap based (i believe windows xp uses both kinds) graphics. none the less i dont like the idea of bloating further an already bloated os with several gigs of artwork. i want a more effietient operating system, not a less effietient one.
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Originally posted by mikhael
But we've had hands on experience. There's dozens of 3d desktop ideas out there. All of them suffer from a lack of supporting hardware or a prevailing reason for using them.
[color=66ff00]I've seen one or two of them, none are implemented to the standard that was exibited by the SUN system and are usually fairly akward to get around in. Can you cite any examples offhand that you think are especially relevant? I found most of them to be poorly thought out and often quite buggy.
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And its not out-of-the-box thinking, either: Since the advent of 3d graphics accellerators, people have been compositing 2d graphics onto a texture buffer and then projecting that in 3d space as a texture on a polygon. We've seen entire games based around using 3d graphics to simulate 2d (MarioRPG for the Gamecube comes to mind). Vista's just the first case of Microsoft doing it in the GUI of their OS.
[color=66ff00]That's not really a good argument, claiming that a GUI and all of the complexities therein can be compared to a game is a bit of a stretch. No game has ever had to use 3D space to handle anywhere near the amount of onscreen information conveyed by a desktop GUI (except perhaps one written by DSmart and we all know how great those are. ;) (and are in actual fact 2D) ).
Using a 3D card to render a 2D interface does not amount to the same thing as using a 3D interface either. That's like saying that 5.1 is exactly the same as stereo simply because they both can utilise a sound processor. The important feature here is to make the desktop more than a layered 2D world and thus allow the kind of skewing, rotating and stacking of windows evident in SUN's system.
As for the mouse and keyboard argument; we haven't seen a device that can really replace one or either, at some point speech may replace the keyboard but only to a certain extent. A lot of research has gone into 'look and click' interfaces i.e. a camera tracks where you're looking on the screen and uses this to plot where the pointer goes. Perhaps one or both of these systems may supercede the keyboard or mouse which have lasted so long due to their simplicity?
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I think what gets me most is that so much effort is being put into a program that has a very basic purpose at the end of the day. It's a Shell Menu gone mad, instead of being able to choose which software you run, some very important aspects of your machine, such as Networking etc, more or less force you to use MS software, rather than go to the shops and browse Networking software.
Now from one point of view, it's a good idea, it helps with intercompatibility and Windows as a package does cost a lot less than buying all the individual features. However, who wants all the individual features, especially when they tend to amalgamate into a massive memory eating, not-quite balanced monster like XP can be.
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Originally posted by Maeglamor
[color=66ff00]As for the mouse and keyboard argument; we haven't seen a device that can really replace one or either, at some point speech may replace the keyboard but only to a certain extent. A lot of research has gone into 'look and click' interfaces i.e. a camera tracks where you're looking on the screen and uses this to plot where the pointer goes. Perhaps one or both of these systems may supercede the keyboard or mouse which have lasted so long due to their simplicity?
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well anyone who has played flight sims should know there are head tracking devices on the market. they let you view around the cockpit by slightly tilting your head. to allow hands free view control. there was also the space ball, a favorite of cad designers, 3d modelers and anyone who has played descent. its a 6 degree of freedom control device consisting of a ball that can translate or rotate on any axis, all with a single control. but they were rather expensive. as far as that goes joystics are pretty cmmon just make it a mandatory device. i dont think speech can replace a keyboard, as some people can type faster than they can speek. anyone who does alot of typing would have a seriously bad case of drymouth. it would be better to get away from qwerty and go with a devorak layout..
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Just a couple things:
1) Real Media is the most evil piece of software ever made short of spyware, not to mention the suspect of stolen IP from other companies that lies in its first products (Rea Media was founded by an ex MS PM, basically the same guy that leaked the MSMPEG4 codec source code that was the foundation of divx)
2) Actually, some mac users quite like XP... http://microsoftuse.temp.powweb.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=365 (biased source of course)
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Originally posted by Nuke
it would be better to get away from qwerty and go with a devorak layout..
[color=66ff00]I've read no small number of reports that say that dvorak is no better than qwerty. Logically this makes no sense to me as you'd expect the optimised key layout to be simply a better idea.
Unfortunately I think convention will enforce the use of qwerty, it's pretty much everywhere and even if you own a dvorak KB you'll still end up running into a qwerty one at work/uni/school etc.
I was being more than a bit speculative in any case regarding new types of input devices. :)
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Originally posted by Maeglamor
[color=66ff00]I've seen one or two of them, none are implemented to the standard that was exibited by the SUN system and are usually fairly akward to get around in. Can you cite any examples offhand that you think are especially relevant? I found most of them to be poorly thought out and often quite buggy.
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That would be my point precisely. There's the two that SUN has worked on, Microsofts Gallery, no less then six or seven open source projects, the CAVE system, etc. All of them fail at their task because they try to map a 2d interface into 3d, but either keep the same controls (keyboard and mouse) or require truly awkward actions (standing in the middle of a series of screens with body tracking). To top it off, the interface remains--at the interaction level--2d.
[color=66ff00]That's not really a good argument, claiming that a GUI and all of the complexities therein can be compared to a game is a bit of a stretch. No game has ever had to use 3D space to handle anywhere near the amount of onscreen information conveyed by a desktop GUI (except perhaps one written by DSmart and we all know how great those are. ;) (and are in actual fact 2D) ).[/color]
No, no game ever has, but looking at the average user's desktop, there's really not a hell of a lot of data going on. Its mostly buttons, empty space, and a small area of interaction. 3d is actually going to be faster than 2d here, just from the accelleration angle. I reference you back to Descentrace. His description is almost exactly the right way to use 3d concepts in a 2d desktop environment (and very likely what Vista will be doing).
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Using a 3D card to render a 2D interface does not amount to the same thing as using a 3D interface either. That's like saying that 5.1 is exactly the same as stereo simply because they both can utilise a sound processor. The important feature here is to make the desktop more than a layered 2D world and thus allow the kind of skewing, rotating and stacking of windows evident in SUN's system. [/color]
No, and I never said it was. I, in fact, have kept the discussion of 3d interfaces and 3d-accellerated 2d interfaces seperate. To respond to the second half of that, I have to ask one thing: what does a rotated or skewed window gain you in the interface? You'll still be using 2d desktop concepts for everything. You'll have windows over windows (the UI as its stands does that), windows side by side (yep), etc. Tossing a window off into 3d space to let it hang about where you can't see it is just fancy eye-candy for minimising it. You haven't gained anything.
Exercise: list all the things you would be able to do with a 3d interface. For my part, I'll show you how each and every one of them maps 1:1 to a 2d desktop interface concept.
[color=66ff00]As for the mouse and keyboard argument; we haven't seen a device that can really replace one or either, at some point speech may replace the keyboard but only to a certain extent. A lot of research has gone into 'look and click' interfaces i.e. a camera tracks where you're looking on the screen and uses this to plot where the pointer goes. Perhaps one or both of these systems may supercede the keyboard or mouse which have lasted so long due to their simplicity?
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Look-and-click devices are just fancy mice. They're still, essentially 2d: you're interacting with an XY cartesian plane, and you are NOT doing anything in the Z direction. To do so would require being able to sense a person's depth of focus at the exact moment (possible, true), but again I ask, what does it gain you? I can already have windows behind windows and I don't need either fancy hardware or fancy interfaces to handle that.
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BTW: Stop bashing Microsoft on 3d desktops.
They've been experimenting on that since 1999 and actually it was one of the features that didn't made on XP even though they were planned...
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Why did they drop it then?
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I would guess limitations of the hardware predominantly available at the time.
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2001 GFX cards didn't have enough memory for it (16mb on average, that would have been a resource hog) plus the implementation proved more difficult than expected and thus scrapped due to their release policy.
I've got a few old articles talking about it but I don't have scanner plus they are in Italian.
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Originally posted by Zarax
BTW: Stop bashing Microsoft on 3d desktops.
They've been experimenting on that since 1999 and actually it was one of the features that didn't made on XP even though they were planned...
[color=66ff00]You're becoming quite well known as a MS zealot. :rolleyes:
I haven't seen anyone take a good jab at MS in this thread but for some reason you feel some dire need to support them against 'phantom' attacks.
Mik: Despite my leanings towards wanting to experiment with the system my stance is of an advocate of trying something different. I'm well aware of the potential gimmick-ery of 3D interfaces, but just to have someone try to implement a semi-professional interface, without cloning something else means that new ideas become available. I've always been a fan of off the wall design, perhaps I'd get bored of it in a week but just to have tried it to see how well it works.
I wonder how many iterations the now famous iPod interface went through before it became the rather sublime one it is now?
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Originally posted by vyper
I would guess limitations of the hardware predominantly available at the time.
Or was it just cause they realised the idea was crap. :D
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Originally posted by Maeglamor
[color=66ff00]You're becoming quite well known as a MS zealot. :rolleyes:
I haven't seen anyone take a good jab at MS in this thread but for some reason you feel some dire need to support them against 'phantom' attacks.
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It may be true that I am biased towards Microsoft but I beg to differ towards the "phantom attacks".
Would you like to have me using precise quoting to the posts where some people made quite some mockery about MS and innovation or could we settle for keeping a civil tone?
It is not my intention to start a flamewar, but just to give proper credit where it's due.
I fully know my opinion is really minoritary here but that shouldn't stop it to have equal dignity as long as it's reasonable.
If the admins have a different opinions please let me know and I shall answer with a proper behaviour.
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Originally posted by karajorma
Or was it just cause they realised the idea was crap. :D
It was for the time, since most likely the memory requisites would have made it a resource hog... ;)
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Originally posted by Zarax
Would you like to have me using precise quoting to the posts where some people made quite some mockery about MS and innovation or could we settle for keeping a civil tone?
[color=66ff00]We are keeping a civil tone, that's entirely my point. I see no scathing attacks against Windows in this thread by anyone.
Perhaps it would be better for you to quote what you think is inflammatory.
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Originally posted by Maeglamor
[color=66ff00]Mik: Despite my leanings towards wanting to experiment with the system my stance is of an advocate of trying something different. I'm well aware of the potential gimmick-ery of 3D interfaces, but just to have someone try to implement a semi-professional interface, without cloning something else means that new ideas become available. I've always been a fan of off the wall design, perhaps I'd get bored of it in a week but just to have tried it to see how well it works.
I wonder how many iterations the now famous iPod interface went through before it became the rather sublime one it is now?
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Experimentation is good, but in this case it won't do any good, in my opinion. Its not just that its gimmickery, its that it genuinely cannot add anything that the "virtual desktops" concept doesn't already do. The current desktop model is a direct result of the desktop PC's origin in the old typewriter. That keyboard, and later the mouse, have reinforced the 2d metaphor to the point that it cannot be escaped without a radical departure.
In my opinion, the first step away from the 2d desktop metaphor will have to be revolutionary. PDAs and other small scale devices that don't rely on the concepts of "sheets of paper on a desktop" are the next step. We need to start looking at other ways of visualising data and working with it.
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[color=66ff00]On the whole I know you're right Mik but I can only see progress being made is small iterations given the present reliance on deeply rooted technology.
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The problem is paradigm.
Our current 2D interface started with a paradigm, the window. From that leads the rest of our interface (controls, desktops, icons).
But there isn't a paradigm for 3D yet. We're not saying it's useless. We're saying that you need a foundation for it first.
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Objects.
Hell, we have Object-Orientated Programming...
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I'm still biased towards minimalist 2D desktops.
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Same here.
Unless I need the equivalent of several monitors (ie. multiple windows open for coding) I'm happy with a shell prompt.
I have yet to figure out exactly what the point of putting a bloated GUI on a server operating system is, which is why my dedicated systems (servers, PVR, etc) tend to be minimalist. The main box is still cursed with Windows but thats because Wine won't run all games. And Visual Studio is pretty damned good for an MS product.