What about "Looking Glass" from SUN?

What about "Looking Glass" from SUN?

Posted Sep 16, 2006 18:09 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: What about "Looking Glass" from SUN? by kornak
Parent article: Animate the Desktop with Xgl and Compiz (Linux Journal)

Looking glass is still around and Sun open sourced it under the GPL license.

https://lg3d-core.dev.java.net/

To bad on it's dependancy on Java, eh? Hopefully Sun finishes up with open sourcing that.

This 3d stuff is very cool. Right now with 2d interfaces you have a very limited and simple interface. I've heard GUIs described as a 'caveman interface', all you do is point and grunt. There have been some limited efforts to expand it.. such as 'mouse gestures', for instance. But with this stuff there is much more openness to create realy sophisticated intefaces. To make a REAL "Human Interface".

Of course we all have heard of the Unix directory system described as a series of caves or a tree or whatnot.. but what if you can actually interact with it like such? Such as moving from room to room with the ability to arrange items in a real space, really interactive environment with more complex symbolism and such. How would you like your CVS or whatnot show up as a file cabinate you can just flip through in addition to issuing commands?

Some interesting things I've found...
For the looking glass thing they found somebody usinng it in a commercial product for minority-report-style interface:
https://lg3d.dev.java.net/ on this page find the video here:
https://lg3d-core.dev.java.net/files/documents/1834/33274...

Here you can see a couple videos which I can't watch right now because their flash :(, but if you can you may be able to see how XGL and it's fluidity lends to a more natural interface:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yx9FgLr9oTk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQkSObRtw0o

Hopefully the UI stuff begins to support multiple pointer devices, which would be especially nice for touch screen interfaces...
http://wearables.unisa.edu.au/mpx/
There are links to other things like that.

Here is a example of a multitouch screen device:
-http://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/

Lowfat is a effort to create a 3d file manager designed to provide a natural interface for humans. It's much cooler then it sounds like.
Videos and screenshots...
http://macslow.thepimp.net/?page_id=18
Ogg formats, also. ;)

Croquet is a ongoing long-term academic project to create a next generation 3d multi-user interface.
http://www.opencroquet.org/
Open source with screenshots and whitepapers.

Of course there are gaming that are doing massive multi user interfaces. I think it would be neat that you'd be able to interact with other people and maybe even have something were you could even run X apps inside of.

All sorts of things like this are cropping up more and more. Its going to be very interesting to see were it all goes.

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