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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

3D Desktop

One of the cool things I've had the chance to play with lately on JDS has been a project codenamed "Looking Glass" which aims to provide a 3D desktop environment. It's largely written with Java (proving for once and for all that there's no inherent performance gap for Java applications) and makes good use of the integrated Java support in JDS.

At one level it provides a 3D windowing environment for existing X applications (interesting enough in its own right), but at another it introduces the ability to create 3D applications where you interact spatially to explore data. In the demo video (starts a little way in, persist or fast-forward ;-) you can see the CD selector from the screen-shot to the right in action, and I can imagine all the other experimental 3D apps I've enjoyed using (photo gallery browsers, SQL database explorers with 3D visualisation, etc.) finally making it to the real world.

Update: There's another, better demo online now.

posted at 6:21 PM (UK) | |