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3Dwm Updates 94

Posted by CmdrTaco from the way-ahead-of-its-time dept.
Robert Karlsson writes "3Dwm, the Three-dimensional window manager, an open source project at Chalmers Medialab, has just released a new, extensive release of 3Dwm, release 0.2.2 - VNC support, 3D scene graph, big texture splitting, client connection, framework, 3D materials support, testsuite added." miles away from a real desktop, but a great testbed for those ideas that are way ahead of their time.
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3Dwm Updates More

3Dwm Updates

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  • AFAIK, the quake engine is very streamlined for 3d. If you were to use it as a windowing environment you could really strip it down by removing all the "game" options. The requirements for it are no longer considered high IMO.

    What I find strange is that Win 95 will run fine on a 486, but in my experience X chokes with insufficent ram. X itself is bloated, and building a WM on top of that adds to the problem. Quakes footprint is not ALL that bad, and again, you would have to modify the code for your specific purpose anyhow.

    I would love to get Carmacks opinion on this.

  • Re:VNC support? (Score:3)

    by frantzdb ( 22281 ) on Friday November 03, 2000 @10:54AM (#650860) Homepage
    That's what I thought at first but if you look at the page, you'll see what they are talking about. They have a virtual desktop, literally. They let you run vnc on the virtual computer on your virtual desktop. http://www.3dwm.org/html/gallery_screenshots.html [3dwm.org]

    --Ben

  • Guys.... (and gals) (Score:4)

    by BluedemonX ( 198949 ) on Friday November 03, 2000 @10:54AM (#650861)
    The critique of the idea of a 3D windowmanager doesn't take into account it was built for a computing environment that ISN'T a desktop (the Cube) and secondly, there may very well be some applications of this we aren't yet aware of.

    I agree that burying Linux, typically the darling OS of the "why do I need a GUI when I can just grep -v -x | sed -qvf | tar -qt32pir2 : smeek -frfk > kibble.rpm ?????" set, in a 3D window manager seems weird: a total waste of CPU cycles, a criminal waste of memory, and an exponentially bad version of Microsoft Bob (eye candy that actually got in the way).

    But who knows? Maybe someone will come up with a way of visualising and representing data that'll only make sense this way.

    Time mechanics data? Physics data? Who knows?

    Just because I can't think of a reason for this yet doesn't mean one exists.
  • Yes, the program that she was using was a real program available for real unix systems--you can download it from SGI's web-site [sgi.com].
  • Actually, that app actually exists for SGI boxen!
  • They mean VNC support at the viewer side. So there is a cool 3D VNC viewer.
  • The horrible part is that this is how you actually DO picture a 4d space =).
  • yes, but without neat cool things to do there would be no reason to make the computers more stable and more fast would there?

    We wouldnt have to worry about using anything but those "totally adequate" 386's ehh?

    If no one ever dared to push the limits of everything, and of no one ever dared to be different or try something new how would we know what works and what doesnt?

    Jeremy

  • Somebody post a mirror.
    ----------
  • Big deal, almost every window managing system ever made has incorporated the dimension of time. Though some implementations are spottier than others. For instance, the dimension of time seemed to crash and freeze quite often on my old windows box, though the other two dimensions seemed mostly unaffected.
  • I did some work using EMG signals to operate as a system controller. It gets to the point after calibration (which takes many many minutes) that you can control the signals with slight twitches instead of full motion. I think that haptics/gloves are more or less stupid unless it's a system that is designed to interpret natural movement and not a programmed controlling (Move your hand 4" up, then 2" right then 2" left and wiggle your thumb to right click). With EMG reads you can twitch.. slight muscle movements that are barely perceptible that become like second nature. That was the goal, my term working on this we never got a "functional" interface.. the mouse just got real jittery but it was a starting point.
    If you are interested in fully interactive controls look at that technology - biocontrol [biocontrol.com] has some cool toys to play with too

  • Sweet Merciful Crap... (Score:5)

    by Isotrope ( 168188 ) on Friday November 03, 2000 @12:12PM (#650870)
    Don't get me wrong, I'd rather this existed than not, but wtf, how is this "way ahead of its time"!?!?!?

    If the only thing we can vary in our user interfaces is how many dimensions they display, its going to be a long time before we make any inroads into dealing with large amounts of data using arbitrarily generated paradigms that minimize the energy input required to acquire a particular piece of information.

    DATA--that is, what computers deal with--DOES NOT require a user interface mapped to the tangible nature of our reality.

    People seem obsessed with the question, "Where is it??? How is it arranged?? How is it layed out???" while the question "WHAT is it??" seems to elude them.

    Sorry if this post seems angry, but this isn't ahead of its time at all. Our interfaces and computers are BEHIND the times. (assuming objective time... yeah, we're both wrong I guess)

    Just my $.02, and yes, I am working on my own interface, but I am only 1 person, so it's going to be awhile.

    --
    Disgruntled AC
  • A 3D WM itself might be somewhat of a nuisance (as is the case with 3Dwm), but adding 3D support directly into the WM would be useful. Using hardware to do anti-aliasing and alpha blending and so forth would certainly take a good amount of load off the system, and would be much faster then trying to do things at the software level. *cough* imlib2 *cough*.
  • No, no, no, wait. A three D window for visualisation of APPLICATION data is one thing. An entire WORKSTATION GUI that's 3D is another.

    The Star Destroyer could be rendered in 2D GUI but in an application window in 3D... right? It's interesting. I'm curious as to why the GUI needs to be 3D.
  • I have heard of a generator that makes random quake levels on the fly. I would love to find it again. I have an idea for a mod/game that could really make use of that technology.

    You could I suppose use flexible design in the way you used the brushes to create the level. You are correct though. The BSP design is fast when the level is already VIS'ed. Good point.
  • Note to moderators: check the posting time before moderating something as redundant. Also mine was my own project done on an apple ][c *with* stereo-scoping.
  • I would much rather have a windowing system that used what hardware I had to its full extent instead of trying to perform the same tasks in software. You might not like purchasing 3d hardware, but do you really prefer going out and spending unholy amounts of money on a new processor just so all the stuff your 3d card can do faster in hardware, can be mimicked in software, and run more responsively? If stuff was done properly from the beginning there wouldn't be as many problems. Naturally, if you want to use a 3d window manager you should have a 3d card. Or if you want to use a 2d window manager that uses 3d for some stuff then you would want your hardware to work properly with it. That of course reduces portability, but then again, some loss of portability is pretty essential.
  • My fondest wish is for a window manager that could nest windows rather than using the "virtual desktop" approach. Sort of like the Xnest X server, but lighter weight. Instead of switching to a different portion of a desktop that won't fit on the screen, you'd make a new (blank) window. An application started in that window would create all of its subwindows in the same window, so, e.g., the whole batch could be iconified and moved around as a group. Actually, I don't know enough about the X protocol to even tell if this is possible, but I can always dream. If anyone is thinking about writing X window manager #1734...
  • The reaction of /.'ers to some cool (but not immediatly useful) technology is, to say the least, scary. You'd think nobody ever said,

    "An x86 UNIX clone? Who needs that? What's the point if we have BSD already? And its not like x86 will ever be fast enough to run UNIX or anything! Why bother?" -Microsoft Weenie circa 1991.

    Be open to new ideas or the dynamicism and vision that made computers successful will dissapear. Even if an idea isn't immediatly useful in raising your Q3 fps or running your JAVA project faster, it might still help in the future. The thinking that I've seen on Slashdot lately is probably the same thinking that led Xerox to invent a networked set of GUI computers exchanging email and not capitalize on *ANY* of it!
  • ...is 3D. X compatibility being written in.

    This has rather more to show for it, though.

  • You should check out the XFree Render Extension that's being developed by Keith Packard (homepage here [xfree86.org]). This does antialiased text in X using your exisiting 3D accelerator (if possible). It also supports REAL alpha transparancy unlike the "let's make this Term psuedo transparent for this screenshot" crap you see all over the place. -adnans
  • We currently use 2D programs to do 3D editing.
    Would it be possible to use these 3D programs to do 4D editing?
    That would really be something *new*
  • http://www.xspace.net/hotsauce/ Very cool stuff - what ever happened to it?
  • Just thought I'd point out that one of the main limiting factors of 3Dwm, Berlin, and similar projects becoming more than just toys is that the hardware support just isn't there. (Yes it is, if you're running under X, but that's kind of defeating the purpose, now, isn't it..?) We need a lower-level hardware acceleration protocol. DRI is nice and all, but it's X-only. Unless people start pulling X and it's drivers apart, the ball's never going to get rolling, and we're going to end up with a lot of projects that started off great, but never really went anywhere because normal everyday users couldn't use 'em.

    Several attempts have been made already to rectify this, but it doesn't look like there's been anything major really accomplished. DRI is still where all of the manpower goes, even though projects like GGI/KGI exist.

    Hopefully, someone will come out with a standard soon, and we can eliminate this kind of waste of effort. (Well, it's not likely, but we can hope, right..?)

    Preferably, such a spec would allow for:
    - kernel-level drivers that just pass along commands
    - a library where all of the actual code exists, to keep the junk out of the kernel.

    Actually, this is what KGI and GGI are.. but you can read about the XFree86 peoples' reasons for not going with their way of doing things for yourself. ... Well, I'm guessing you can. I still haven't found one, myself.

    (Incidentally, can anyone think of any reasons why this sort of thing ISN'T a good idea..?? I still haven't figured out myself why the XFree86 people are so hesitant to split X like this. Granted, it's an extra pipeline, but then again, that's pretty much what DRI is, too. And considering the added safety of not having a root application playing with kernel registers..)

    James
  • it's a joke that many people find funny
  • Well something similar has been done with Doom [unm.edu] already, so why not Quake?

  • How does a mathematician picture a 4d space? He pictures an n-dimension space, then lets n=4.

    God I love math humor.

  • I remember a post to slashdot a while back that basically said that antialiasing was only a remeant of keeping text readable on crappy monitors with low resoultion or some such. So theoretically it really isn't all that important.
  • That's cool, I didn't know it was real(ish). Maybe I'll stop making fun of the scene now.

    Well, maybe not. :) But seriously, that's pretty neat.

  • The more plumbing you add, the easier it is to stop up the drain.
  • It's funny that someone would think it wasteful to have 3D hardware supporting a WM, while at the same time others buy card after card to keep up with the requirements of various games.

    This is something that actually could serve a more general, practical purpose than a 3d game engine: 3D visualization of workspace data. This, in my opinion, is a better justification for a hardware purchase than Q3.

  • I could tab-switch between the objects on my desk, and they would float 2 feet above it in front of me one at a time...

    Seriously, though, this is a good point. If we're going to have a new sort of WM with new dimensions of navigation, then we should ideally have new input devices along with it. The mouse/trackball/whatever is already really inadequate in 2D space (to me)...

    I seem to remember some people having gotten a Nintendo Power Glove connected and working with a PC as an input device, though that might not be the best idea unless you could still type, and preferably de/equip it quickly and easily. I remember trying the Power Glove when it first came out, and it wasn't exactly the easiest thing to use (although the argument could be made that neither is a mouse unless you're used to it, which is the same argument I use about Windows vs $OS)


    Sotto la panca, la capra crepa
  • Actually, I believe 4dwm was simply SGI's name for their own slightly modified version of mwm - at least whenever I was running 4dwm it looked like mwm with uglier widgets.

    Or were you trying to be funny?

  • Heh, chill down. Nobody is going to take away your beloved /bin/ps, /bin/kill etc.

    On the other hand, consider this (taken from one of our servers at work):

    load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

    ... and distributed.net isn't interactive enough for me.

  • What the hell does litestep have to do with a 3d WM?
    Litestep is a buggy clone of AfterStep that makes windows slightly more usable but much less stable.. in no way is it remotely 3d or attemps to be that way.
  • Unfortunatly it already has been. Some time ago.
    Back in 1996 I remember downloading quake levels that were exactly that.

    It has been done with doom as well.

    From what I understand the novelty of such things has worn off because I have not heard about it being done in Quake 2-3 or any other engine to date.
  • If I remember correctly, (and its been awhile since i read it) David Brin's Earth had computers with a voice activated interface similar to what you're describing... subvocal twitches in the larynx allowed the system to pick up intentions to speak and act on those, rather than waiting for the actual sounds (which could also annoy the hell out of one's coworkers. )Interesting how fiction and life aren't so very far apart anymore.
  • BS.

    I ran Linux/X on a 386/20 with 2 MB of RAM, 20 MB of disk and a Herc monochrome card a hell of a lot better than any competing "OS". Also note that X runs on Compaq's iPAQ handheld.

    Joe
  • There was a recent post on that described a company building these holographic type displays. Someone will remember and post it, located in the north east I believe.

    Anyway, they were primarily concerned with medical imaging and CAD type stuff. Probably all for the investors. Why do medical work when I can watch Windows crash in both 2d and holographic 3d?

  • Uses of 3D window managers (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If you have one of these [pdc.kth.se] then you need a 3Dwm. Dont you agree?
  • The actual start of this research was for paralyzed people, who often times can still "twitch" their muscles but not have a strong enough signal to the muscle to move the joint. Studying this along with neural net training algorithms and the capability was there.. really fascinating stuff though.
  • Then at least we'd be seeing something real.

    The 3D graphical file browser seen in Jurassic Park was fsn [sgi.com], a throwaway, proof-of-concept tool developed at SGI. It was real.

  • BS

    No, its not BS. As I said in my original post in my experience I have watched X choke. I was dual booting a 486 DX with 32 MB of ram and win 95 ran faster than Linux with X and FWMV95. Thats what I have witnessed. (RH 5.2 back in the day). Ok, maybe I don't know how to optimize X to give it better performance than explorer.exe. Fine.

    Would you care to let me know how to do it? Because on my P-133 with 32 MB of ram X is still slow. On my primary machine (Celeron 450, 192 Mb of ram, matrox G400, dual boot) Windows does not have a chance. X just *SMOKES* explorer. It runs like a dog on the other machines.
  • Quake is a great engine for FPS games, but its not nearly dynamic enough to be a useful core for something like this project. Are you going to wait 30 mins to a few hours while a new vis'd BSP data set is generated each time you want to rearrange the layout of your 3D desktop?
  • Just kick you monitor a bit 'till the image is a little bit fuzzy and voila. Instant Hardware FSAA !!!

    (and this is true - my 17" fell off the truck at unload and now at 1152x864 the image is a liiitle fuzzy (like a .2 AntiAliasing) All the X fonts look now gorgeous)

    --
  • Is when you take technology like this and combine with this stuff here: http://www.evil3d.net/reviews/dti_vw/

    We've all gotten used to "3d" games on a very "2d" monitor - time to press forward!

    Oh, and you know it has to be said: "Can you run a beowulf cluster inside 3dwm?" =^) -Ben

  • 3d sounds nice but having a window manager need a massive 3d accelerator isn't something I rally go for.
  • Not quite. Berlin is currently using Mesa, yes, but not for what you might think. It's using it as a drawingkit. (I think that's the correct terminology.)

    There're other drawing kits available too. It's not the only one.

    And as far as X compatibility is concerned, that's already there. There's support, already, for getting a GGI context, from which you can run XGGI on top of it. (XGGI is an X server that runs on a GGI context.) The other method, integration of X into GGI, is something I have no clue as to what's being done. (I'm on the mailing list, but I haven't heard much talk about this at all, so.. *shrug*)

    James
  • Let me get this straight you are going to have something with the memory footprint and processing power that quake needs and add that to a window manager? Isn't Enlightenment powerful/wasteful enough?
  • That would be it. Thanks.
  • God, that breaks me up every time I think about it. Hey, maybe they can try and get Hollywood to use this the next time they want to make a movie about "hackers". Then at least we'd be seeing something real.
  • dri X specific? no it's not...

    DRI is an arbitration manager for direct rendering. anyone can use it, not just X...
  • I admit that improvement is there but what areas exactly?

  • Why not use the Quake engine? (Score:4)

    by Mr. Flibble ( 12943 ) on Friday November 03, 2000 @10:05AM (#650914) Homepage
    John Carmack thoughtfully GPL'ed the Quake engine, why can't this be used for a WM?

    Quake is a lean 3d graphics engine, and now with programmers working on it at sourceforge [sourceforge.net] it can only improve. Heck, since you can run it from the command line you can completly bypass X! (Although too much software depends on X now...)

  • Yeah (Score:1)

    by sips ( 212702 )
    at the temperature of your overclocked 3d accelerator as the liquid metal streams down your leg

  • This is a bad idea. (Score:3)

    by wbattestilli ( 218782 ) on Friday November 03, 2000 @10:12AM (#650916)
    I'll admit that my desktop is crowded with apps and terminals and the extra dimension would give my alot more room to work. At the same time, I constantly loose stuff on my 'real' 3D desktop. I would be really pissed off to search for my email client for 10 minutes only to find it minimized in the far corner behind Mozilla.
  • It just so happens that the girl in the above quote was using something similar to this program so it's at least tangentially relevent.
  • quake 3 can run on a machine but it takes more system resources and therefore has a better chance of locking up the machine. When you want to do something like kill processes and the machine can barely move you really should have something a bit more portable.
  • It looks like the site is ALREADY slashdotted. Out of mercy, maybe we should warn sites that they are about to be buried under a mud slide of hits so they can make sure they don't lose important stuff when their machines die.
  • What does a window manager do for VNC [att.com]? VNC provides PCAnywhere-like access cross-platform to let you control a desktop on another machine (whether Mac, Windows, or Unix). It works by copying pixel-level information; not high-level stuff a window manager would care about.

    Or is there some other "VNC" acronym in play here?

  • Ummm...The original poster said *Quake* not Quake III.
    IIRC the minimum requirement for software-rendered Quake was a P60.
    Just for perspective, a web browser requires more than that now days.

    What's up with that 'more portable' comment anyways?
    It's totally out of context...'More efficient' or 'lighter weight' would have been appropriate,
    but 'more portable' makes no sense in a statement about resource usage.

    --K
    ---
  • 3D imaging comes instantly to mind. Want to look at your model of...I don't know...a Star Destroyer, at a slightly different angle, *turn your head*. Granted, I have no idea if 3dwm is there yet, but that's the promise this kind of thing holds.

    At least for me.
  • Don't have time to find the link right now but there was the person at The University of New Mexico who was using the Doom engine as an interface to do sysadmin type stuff. Very cool last time I looked at it. Someone post the link please.
  • There are some things that will create their own market. Of COURSE there's not much you can do with a 3d WM right now, 'cause there hasn't been one on which to do it! I'm sure there are plenty of applications in the dream-stage right now that will benefit greatly from such a setup.

    Of course, you have to remember, this could also just be the first step to a real 3d WM. What I mean is, no matter what kind of 3d accelerator you have, no matter what 3d FPS games you play, no matter which 3dWM you use, you're still staring at a flat (or reasonably so anyway) screen in front of your face. Once the technology exists for TRUE holographic (or whatever) 3d display systems, you'll see the REAL benefit of all this. Of course, who's going to construct cool holographic displays before there's a good 3d WM to run on it.....? Get my point? I say more power to ya. Wish I could code like that so I could help ya.
  • Looks kinda cool, but it only runs on irix, and not very many people on slashdot can afford a sgi to run it on. To bad they don't provide the source.

  • Re:Oh, but if only... (Score:4)

    by nellardo ( 68657 ) on Friday November 03, 2000 @11:18AM (#650926) Homepage Journal
    I seem to remember some people having gotten a Nintendo Power Glove connected and working with a PC as an input device
    The first example I remember of that was Randy Pausch's group, then at UVa, in a paper called "Virtual Reality on $10 a day," in the UIST conference. It was a cute (and effective) demonstration of how researchers were pursuing expensive toys and not actually addressing the issues. Rather than a half a mil in SGI and one-off things, Randy put together a complete, head-tracked, head-mounted, glove-input (using the Nintendo glove), 3D virtual environment, for less than $10000, in 1994. The most expensive component was the magnetic tracker for about $6000. It was monoscopic, black-and-white, and wireframe, but it did 30 HHz, using SPHIGS (the simplified educational version of PHIGS used by Foley, van Dam, Feiner, Hughes).

    Unfortunately, glove interfaces (even with a more expensive and more accurate DataGlove) have two problems: fatigue and lack of haptics.

    Re fatigue, how long can you mouse around on the desk for? (hint - how long can you play quake at one sitting?) Now try swinging your arm, unsupported, in the air for that amount of time - that's called calisthenics.

    Re haptics, a great deal of control comes from kinesthetic feedback (why you can touch your finger tips on opposite hands together with your eyes closed). When using something like a mouse, the inability to move in certain directions gives you a great deal of information. A mouse is relatively crude at this, but a pressure-sensitive tablet is better and an actual paintbrush is better still. Now pick up a virtual paintbrush (hint - you can't feel it in your fingers) and try to paint with it (hint - you can't tell when it touches the canvas). Researchers have tried substituting sound (a noise when you run into something), and "ghosting" to show where the virtual object actually is (because of physical constraints) and where you put it (i.e., straight through the canvas).

    This has, in part, I think, led to the recent research popularity of augmented reality and "virtual desktops".

  • Among others, us Windoze users get the option of using "Dimension [teniji.com]", developed by Ninvenh.

    The website's unfortunatly all Flash 5, so you can find a summary (and the beta binaries) here [pimpin.net] if you're flash-intolerant.

    But if you want my opinion, everything pales in comparison to Litestep [litestep.net] :)

    ***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
    ***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***

  • The problem isn't with X, its with the device drivers. The support in X for the $20 video cards that almost everyone had back in the day of 486's suck hard. Noone wanted to write drivers, so the ones that did get written suck hard. On the other hand the companies that made the cards had to write drivers, to make their cards not seem like as much crap.

    The G400 on the other hand is a card people are willing to work on, because it is a kick ass card(i own one, great for everything from quake3 to crystal clear 2D).

  • The killer app (Score:4)

    by Docrates ( 148350 ) on Friday November 03, 2000 @01:15PM (#650929) Homepage
    IF you ask me, this could well be the killer app that would put linux and/or other opensource/free software OS' on every desktop. (you do realize we need a killer app for that right?)

    Surely a lot of people will just say no! waste of cycles, waste of memory, waste of time!, but i couldn't disagree more. If i could have a 3d view of 6 different programming sessions with a real time representation of runtime results i would. it doesn't matter how much hardware i throw at my current system, i just can't do this today. same for designers, engineers, etc. this would mean a real productivity boost.

    which brings me to my point... with the current pointer/icon/double-click/window interface, there isn't much to gain on the productivity side even if you throw in 5 years of moore's law. we're stuck. it's the same thing that happened when the GUI first came along, everyone said it was a waste of resources, but now that we have the hardware we're glad they worked on it nonetheless.

    of course we need a good navigation system an efficient way to handle objects, but both exist today: i'm pretty efficient in moving around in quake and homeworld, and i can move objects in 3d pretty easily using truspace or Max...

    actually i think we're late in doing this. the hardware to support a totally 3d desktop is here (GTS Ultra, 1GHz CPU, 512MB Ram would probably do the job). it's just a few years before similar hardware is standard configuration for most. If by then linux (or similar) are the only platform that will give you an intuitive 3d environment, lots of people would get it.

  • MOSX (Score:1)

    by Malc ( 1751 )
    "You did see Jurassic park, didn't you? You may remember the little twerp who sat down at a system and proceeded to zoom her way about the system in true Max Headroom 3D style."

    They must have been using some sort of beta release of Mac OS X. I haven't seen the film in a long time, but I swear they said they were using UNIX, but all of the hardware had Apple logos on it. (Of course, I could be confusing details from the book with the Hollywood production).
  • I was just trying to be funny. 4dwm pretty much blows.

    wog
  • There's a program called fsv [mit.edu] that looks similar and works just fine under Linux and Mesa.

    -jfedor
  • And that is just the dumbest fscking thing I've ever seen. Just what I need -- sit down at my desk and fire up a 3D window manager so I can...sit down at a desk and use a 2D window manager to actually do my work. Why in $diety's name did they choose this as a demo? Why not show us something at least interesting rather than an obvious WOMBAT?
  • If I recall, that was a security system application and was supposedly real, just slightly adapted.

  • Misnamed, but way cool (Score:3)

    by Webmonger ( 24302 ) on Friday November 03, 2000 @02:14PM (#650935) Homepage

    This sucker is not a window manager. Not mainly.

    This is the 3-D equivalent of X-Windows.

    Like X-windows, it allows many programs to run using the same resource. Only, instead of that resource being a 2-D plane, it's a 3D volume.

    Take a look at this screenshot [3dwm.org]. It looks to me like the desk and the screen are being generated by two separate programs, through 3dwm. And it's apparently network-transparent.

    What's really new about this seems to be the display of several 3-d programs in the same space, not the notion of a three-dimensional desktop.

  • I work for Microsoft. This has no effect on my intelligence or wisdom.

    On Slashdot, however, it probably has negative effects on your Charisma...

  • soooo, what does this have to do with the topic at hand?

    You did see Jurassic park, didn't you? You may remember the little twerp who sat down at a system and proceeded to zoom her way about the system in true Max Headroom 3D style.

    I look forward to the day when we replace /etc/passwd with a VRML file, MD5 sums with collision hulls, and the 31337 h4x0r 0wnz j00 only because of his superior dexterity.

    Mark my words - all this Quake playing you do today - this practice of button reflex and mouse coordination - this is going to pay off in SPADES once we enter the world of - 3D SECURITY!

  • It's been done before. Anybody remember Chrome?
  • they already are to show buildings to clients before it is built.

  • Wrongo (Score:1)

    by sips ( 212702 )
    Where did you go to school? Simple math here

    For instance, with every mouse movement you have to calculate the new coordinates in a 3 space trialog, instead
    of the old Cartesian method.

    Even a first year calculus student knows this is BS. Moving to 3 space dosn't cause you to change from cartesian coordianates. No if for example you base your coordinates on rotational movement then you might have a point about doing something but even then it's not a function of a larger store of video ram but a faster processor.
  • Is it me, or is nobody taking this topic seriously?
    Not that I don't mind, due to the fact that I'm busting a gut LMAO about some of the topics here ... ^_^

  • This could make for some really cool desktop backgrounds and themes.... ahh the possabilities...
  • who is making you use it?

    Why not get some use outta a 3D card than gaming?

    Different strokes for different folks...Diversity to an extent is good, this is a good kind.

    Jeremy

  • Re:"This is Unix! I KNOW this!" (Score:3)

    by jfedor ( 27894 ) <jfedor@jfedor.org> on Friday November 03, 2000 @10:51AM (#650944) Homepage
    It's from Jurassic Park. The girl sits down at a console with a fake 3d window manager and says "This is unix! I know this!"

    Actually, it wasn't a fake 3D window manager, it was a real 3D file manager. It is actually named fsn and you can read about it and download it from here [sgi.com].

    -jfedor

  • Re:Isn't antialiasing outdated (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    No, it's not. Monitors still max at less than 150dpi.
    Until they're at *least* 250 dpi I'll still want antialiasing.
    Just because you read it on slashdot doesn't mean it's any where near true.
    Inform yourself. Don't parrot back what some ill-informed slashbot said.
  • There are two fundamental problems with three-dimensional user interfaces:

    1. We cannot see three-dimensionally. We see only a two-dimensional projection of the three dimensional world plus a little depth information. If you close one eye, you lose even that.

    2. A monitor is two-dimensional. You can emulate the third dimension, but it really isn't there. Thus, on a monitor you don't have depth information either.

    A three-dimensional interface might be worthwhile if we had big holographic displays in which we could enter and interact with, similar to a "holo-deck". But until we have that kind of technology, I believe 3D user interfaces are not going to make significant inroads, especially not if they take the approach of 3dwm, namely moving 2D windows around in a 3D world. 2D window managers let one manage windows quite efficiently today. There is not much to gain on that front.

    bye
    schani
  • Actually, indigo2s are getting pretty cheap these
    days. Picked up a green R4400 250Mhz for about
    $500.

  • Clearing up some points (Score:5)

    by NickElm ( 9556 ) on Friday November 03, 2000 @03:32PM (#650949) Homepage

    I'm one of the core developers of 3Dwm, and I've watched with horrid fascination as the webserver was nearly toppled by the tremendous /.-onslaught just recently (have a look at the logs [chalmers.se]). Now, browsing the comments, I thought I should post and clear up some points.

    First of all, yes, 3Dwm is misnamed. 3Dwm is NOT an X11 window manager, it is a user environment (the beginnings of the 3D-equivalent of X11). However, the name has stuck with us since our first appearance [slashdot.org] on Slashdot, so we don't want to change it.

    Secondly, the main platform for 3Dwm is not normal desktop computers (though it does run on desktop systems), but Virtual Reality devices (like this [chalmers.se] one). In Virtual Reality, you have some amazing 3D interaction possibilities that few existing applications exploit.

    As for VNC [att.com] support, 3Dwm has VNC client (not server) functionality, just as one observant slashdotter pointed out. This allows us, in a network-transparent fashion that is in keeping with the distributed nature of the rest of 3Dwm, to display graphical desktops of any major windowing system (including Windows, X11, and MacOS) in 3D.

    There's always skeptics who wonder what you would use a system like this for when 2D is perfectly fine. To that I can only answer that there are, in fact, areas where 3D could help a great deal, mainly in the fields of design, modelling, and information visualization. Why, take a look at this [chalmers.se] (and this [chalmers.se] and this [chalmers.se]) screenshot for a prototype 3D web browser.

    Btw, today marks the one-year anniversary of our last slashdotting (I wrote up a short summary [3dwm.org] of the comments we got last time). Cool, eh? :)

  • big deal (Score:3)

    by woggo ( 11781 ) on Friday November 03, 2000 @10:20AM (#650950) Journal
    IRIX has come with a *four*-dimensional window manager for years: 4dwm.

    wog

  • Let me get this straight you are going to have something with the memory footprint and processing power that quake needs and add that to a window manager? Isn't Enlightenment powerful/wasteful enough?

    One word for you: antialiasing. Finally a way to have antialiased text in X. That's worth two 3D accelerators and another DIMM if you ask me - if you spend as much time staring at a display as I do, you may agree.

    Sure be nice if there were a cheaper way to do it though. :P

  • It appears to be a theme for englightenment or some such according to google

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