From: Niklas Elmqvist [d97elm@dtek.chalmers.se]
Sent: Monday, October 04, 1999 2:48 PM
To: 3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu
Subject: Re: Member introduction

On Mon, 4 Oct 1999, Jason Jerald wrote:

> The 3d window manager you mention sounds somewhat like what I am doing. 
> Is there any information on this that I can access?

I would be very interested as well. Check out the following links, if you
have not already (these links are all from the 3Dwm site, but they seemed 
to have been accidentally misplaced by our webmaster):

	Multi-head X server (GGI Project)
	http://www.ggi-project.org/images/cube_withxggi.jpg

	The Berlin Consortium (new window system with OpenGL as renderer
	-- not 3D)
	http://www.berlin-consortium.org

	Z 3D UI
	https://www.talisman.org/~erlkonig/z/img/z/z-tty-early.jpg

	IBM RealPlaces
	http://www.ibm.com/ibm/easy/design/lower/f080201.html

	DIVE
	http://www.sics.se/dive/

> 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.

I'm the main developer of 3Dwm, as a matter of fact. I was going to start
a thread on this issue once we got up to speed somewhat and added some
updated information to the homepage, but I guess this is a good time as
any.

Development of 3Dwm is currently halted somewhat due to a shift in
objectives -- we're now aiming for a more general immersive 3D system with
2D-application support as an extension. The scope is very much like the
original X Window System, that is, a general-purpose user environment
based on a client/server architecture (only now we're going to use CORBA
instead of rolling our own communications protocol like X11 does). I'll
outline the system design on this list if there is interest.

The lessons learned from 3Dwm are very useful and come in handy for
continued development. We actually managed to put together a
sort-of-working system using Xvfb, the virtual frame buffer X server. The
screenshots on the above URL
(http://www.medialab.chalmers.se/projects/3dwm) show some samples of the
window manager in action (not very impressive, I know, but we're still
just starting out here). The source code *would* be available, but we
never got around to putting it up and what with the new design, we'll wait
until we get something more interesting to show off. Hopefully, some of
the design documents on the site may be of some use, though.

> -- 
> Jason Jerald                    Human-Centered Systems Department
> mailto:jjerald@hrl.com          Information Sciences Laboratory
> (310) 317-5622                  HRL Laboratories
> http://home.earthlink.net/~jasonjerald

/Nick

-- Niklas Elmqvist (d97elm@dtek.chalmers.se) ----------------------
  "One of the universal rules of happiness is: always be wary of any
   helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual."
           -- Terry Pratchett, Jingo