From: Jerry Isdale [jbisdale@gte.net] Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 1999 12:50 AM To: Maarten van Dantzich; 'Niklas Elmqvist' Cc: '3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu' Subject: RE: 3D window management Wow, Maarten seems to have hit a hot topic! I'm familiar with Data Mountain and Jason's work at HRL (my day job). I thought I'd throw in my 2cents... 2D apps, especially in the Microsoft world, have highly optimized hardware working for them. Unfortunately, mapping that into a 3D world loses a lot. Very few 3d worlds do a decent job with text and when you try to use the 2d app as a bit map, readabilty suffers greatly. HMDs are horrible for this sort of environment. The resolution is just way too low to start with. Perhaps if you have one of the Kaiser Pro XGAs it might begin to be usable. Otherwise its worse than trying to web surf on NTSC TV. Jason's work a fair bit more readable, but he has the three walls of the HRL CABANA (cave adjecent beach and nearby areas - or some similar acronymn). One approach I'd like to see is using 2d hardware as direct sources for bitmaps into the 3d world. Instead of feeding a video converter, the 2d frame would feed (be sampled) into texture memory at appropriate resolution. (drat, now I gave away the idea and someone else is gonna make a buck on it.) As for the support of HMDs and commerical 3d interfaces, I'll be much happier when Windows 2000 comes out with support for multiple monitors. Let me put three wicked fast 3d accelerator boards in my PC and put it up on three large (flat) screens). Feed the texture memory from 2d accelerators that run different applications or completely different desktops. Add in a few cameras to track my head and hands for gestures (something Myron Kruger showed years ago). Multiple monitors would be much nicer than any sort of "perspective wall". ============= Jerry Isdale email: isdale@acm.org web: http://isdale.com/jerry fax: 805 496 8547