From: Maarten van Dantzich [maartenv@MICROSOFT.com] Sent: Monday, October 04, 1999 2:23 PM To: 'Jason Jerald'; 3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu Subject: RE: 3D window management There's nothing publically available yet. The system isn't under wraps--we've shown public demos, e.g. at WinHEC99, but we have papers about our 3D Window Manager (the Task Gallery) under submission, so we haven't published anything on our website. (The ACM seems to claim that such disclosure may constitute prior publication--sigh!) The infrastructure is a modification to a few DLLs in Windows 2000 that allow us to redirect both output (the app's visual bits) and input (mouse & keyboard events). We force an app render to an offscreen-bitmap without it being aware that this happens; we filter input events, particularly mouse events, at a very low level in the system to detect if they're over the app's 3D representation, and do coordinate touch-up as necessary to recover the 2D mouse point in the app's coordinate frame. Etc. I suspect the work at Chalmers is similar in flavor, though I haven't looked at it yet; don't they hack up an X Server? (XFree86?) By the way, I totally agree with your reasoning for the motivations to bring 2D apps into 3D; our aim was to create a 3D environment in which all your productivity tools come along, so you can live in it and start adding novel features to it while doing real work. So many existing 3D environments are interesting but only usable in narrow applications or for demos. :) (That said, making something good enough that you can use it full-time is a bear of a task for a small research team!) >> Maarten. PS: are any of the Chalmers folks on this list? Are y'all going to be at UIST this year? Maybe we should do a "birds of a feather" session to talk abuot the systems issues in this domain. -----Original Message----- From: Jason Jerald [mailto:jjerald@isl.hrl.hac.com] Sent: Monday, October 04, 1999 11:04 AM To: Maarten van Dantzich; 3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu Subject: Re: Member introduction The 3d window manager you mention sounds somewhat like what I am doing. Is there any information on this that I can access? My current project deals with interacting with 2d applications in immersive environments. This may not be the best way to interact in 3d but it is the quickest and most convienent. For example I do not think a user would want to write a calculator application just to use it in an immersive environment. It should be easy to pull up an existing application such as powerpoint or netscape. Many of these applications are 2d in nature anyways so there is not much benefit in going to full 3d in such cases. I am currently working on a 3d window system which is similar to 2d window functionality such as scaling, minimizing, etc. in addition to features such as eye following. I am also new to this list. There was some discussion in the archives about such work previously. In particular the 3dwm work at http://www.medialab.chalmers.se/projects/3dwm/index.html is interesting. Jason Maarten van Dantzich wrote: > > I quietly joined the list a while back. > > I'm in the Adaptive Systems & Interaction group at Microsoft Research, > working with George Robertson, Ken Hinckley, Dan Robbins, et al. on 3D UI > for the desktop. I was one of the implementers of the Data Mountain (3D UI > for Web Favorites & for personal document management in general), and more > recently we built the Task Gallery, a 3D window manager that hosts real > (unmodified) Windows applications. In general we try to do 3D with a very > low barrier to entry (2D interaction technques, no special devices) while > still getting some of the advantages of 3D visuals (perceptual cues, spatial > metaphor, etc.); we also try to do some psych studies to probe some basic > research issues--most notably use of spatial memory as an aid to organizing. > > >> Maarten. -- Jason Jerald Human-Centered Systems Department mailto:jjerald@hrl.com Information Sciences Laboratory (310) 317-5622 HRL Laboratories http://home.earthlink.net/~jasonjerald