h a l f b a k e r y"This may be bollocks, but it's lovely bollocks."
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3D OS
A 3D operating system world. | |
Instead of the boring desktop what if someone created a 3D
house, like in driver, that would replace the desktop. If you
want to open up a word
document you drag a piece of paper from a stack on a desk
to
a type writer sitting next to it. Or if you want to play a
game
click on the closet
from there you see a stack of board
games
only with the boxes modeled after the games you own, click
on a box and the game starts up. would that not be fun ?
Doom as a tool for system administration
http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/
[jutta, Sep 26 2001]
3Dsia
http://threedsia.sourceforge.net/
More ambitious. [jutta, Sep 26 2001]
Microsoft Bob
http://www.grateful...ts/msbob/msbob.html
You mean, sort of like this? [egnor, Sep 26 2001]
3Dwm
http://www.3dwm.org/
A three-dimensional window manager. [egnor, Sep 26 2001]
FSN
http://www.sgi.com/...e/3d_navigator.html
The 3D file system navigator featured in _Jurassic Park_. [egnor, Sep 26 2001]
antarcti.ca
http://antarcti.ca/
More silly 3D visualization. [egnor, Sep 26 2001]
Packard Bell Navigator
http://www.computer.../software/pbnav.htm
Theoretically more newbie-friendly than Windows, PBNav's main feature was a set of "rooms" that each had a themed desktop background (living room, game room, office) and contained icons for relevant applications and data files. [egnor, Sep 26 2001]
3DOSX
http://www.acm.uiuc...riors/eoh2k2/3dosx/
A 3D file browser, for the Mac OS X clan. Anyone out there? Anyone? [Valrus, Oct 17 2002]
compiz fusion
http://www.compiz-fusion.org/
Easy and fun-to-use windowed environment, allowing use of the graphics hardware to render each individual window and the entire screen, to provide some impressive effects, speed and usefulness. [erlehmann, Jan 11 2008]
Creater of Doom joins Facebook
http://techcrunch.c...loyee/?ncid=tcdaily
[JesusHChrist, Mar 26 2014]
[link]
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This gets a geniune laugh, and therefor a croissant. I only hope that this was written intentionally ironically, because if it wasn't... Well, I'll just assume that it was. |
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What you describe is a "shell", that is, an interface program that lets you set system parameters and manipulate files and processes, not an operating system. |
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I was thinking about this a while ago while trying to train some people to understand file systems. "You don't have to dump *everything* in My Documents", I pleaded. "Your organisation has spent tens of thousands of dollars on various servers and a robust network infrastructure. I'm sure the designers had more than just Hotmail in mind when they decided to go with this system!" |
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It would have been nice to be able to let the users visualise filing cases and office tools. It would be slow, but eventually they be taught to use conventional office utilities by a talking paperclip or something. |
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There is a tendency in the idea and in some comments to waste 3D space to model what are essentially icons - filing cabinets, boxes, pieces of paper. If that's all you can come up with, you don't need 3D. |
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I'd rather see the extra dimension and rendering power used to do something quantiative. They're recently modified files or processes that consume a lot of CPU power? You can tell from the glow. Large files are large, small ones small. Directories bulge with the files they contain, or hang around slack and empty. Similar things are next to each other. Pat's files tend to be purple. It's easy to detect spam because all the exclamation marks and upper case letters make it spiky. If this system gets any busier, the low ceiling will drop even lower and we'll all be squished. Etc... |
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[jutta] Took the words right out of my mouth. |
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And I want to use a glove or gloves instead of a mouse. |
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So. Icons are metaphors which convey info. A successful metaphor is one which is widely recognized by as many users as possible--yeah, a file folder. Let the Y axis represent increasing complexity of an icon and the X axis represent the users who understand the icon intuitively. Hypothesize a range of icon design from inspired to idiosyncratic. Somewhere in that range is an optimum icon design. |
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Or: Take a penguin, put a Mac on her, throw her out the Windows, and see if her BSDs stay on. |
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Didn't they have this in that terrible film Disclosure, accessing files via VR systems and virtual filing cabinets? |
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Anyway, it'd be unfeasibly slow to get anything practical done in such a system. It might have training applications (see sdm) or be usable by newbies, but which is going to be easier - miming picking up a file, walking across to another filing cabinet, opening the cabinet, and putting it in; or typing "mv fil* ../newd"? UNIX rules. |
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In Jurassic Park, the computer systems had a 3D interface, if I remember right, and innumerable other movies have used similar visuals. As Rods Tiger says, there's not much you can communicate with 3D that you can't express just as effectively with good 2D. [sdm] has a point, I think, but if people don't get the idea of a 'desktop' with 'files' and 'folders', that sit 'open' and 'on top of' each other, (and some of them don't) I think they'll remain blithely indifferent to the visual metaphor of a filing cabinet or virtual office. |
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One 3D idea that has been floating around for a while goes like this: |
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Imagine your CRT screen is the front face of a cube.
Rotate it to any of the other five faces and have a new desktop. |
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I'm surprised nobody mentioned Microsoft Bob, which is very similar in concept to the original idea here. See link, and other links too. Consider also Gibson's cyberspace and the lame dramatizations of hacking as flying through a psychedelic 3D landscape that appear in movies from _Tron_ to _The Matrix_. |
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Anyway, everyone seems to say "hey, let's make a 3D GUI 'desktop'!" at some point. Most people get over it after turning the idea over in their heads for a while, but there's certainly no shortage of attempts floating around out there. |
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Thing is, screens are 2D, retinas are 2D, vision is basically 2D. 3D doesn't add anything except the simulation of physical space; it's not necessarily very useful for conveying information. |
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Anyone remember the Packard Bell start interface for the 'old days?' It was an series of rooms that you moved through. |
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The office was where you had business apps, the game room games, and what not. |
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Apart from the shell and the machine being complete trash, it was not too bad. |
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Or how about the 3-D environment form Jurassic Park "Hey I know this, its UNIX" :p |
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The Packard Bell program you describe is "Packard Bell Navigator"; see link. The Jurassic Park program you describe is SGI's FSN demo, which has been mentioned two or three times *and* linked at least once already. |
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Guy_Fox and wingnut: Next time you watch Jurassic Park, watch the bottom of the 'computer interface'. There is a Quicktime progress bar. It's a .mov file. |
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"The Net" - laughable chase scene with Bullock running full speed at 5 mph |
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And then there's the PC's that make the default Mac warning sound, but only when something goes RIGHT. Or Jeff Goldglum uploading a virus to the Mothership's computer in Independence Day. What a joke. Makes TRON seem reasonable. |
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I was toying a few years ago with the idea of a program that would generate a quake "meta-level" from a user's collection of Quake maps (similar to the level-select screen of Quake itself) and allow the user to select a level just by wandering around to it. I was unable to come up with any decent way of handling .PAK files, though, and further decided the original idea was maybe not so cool as I thought. |
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I believe that a 3d OS is a great idea, simply because it would be funner. I'd love to throw on some VR Goggles and explore the net with floating windows and little fishies swimming around them (watch Cowboy Bebop). |
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A 3d world is far more entertaining than a 2d world (unless you're a fan of Galaga, I am!). And it is my belief that educationally speaking, one does retain information better when it's fun to learn. |
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Something I wrote back in 1995:
http://everist.org/texts/guyd/rant/doom_os.txt
All that money and programming time game developers invest, and so far only one poorly implemented linkage between a game and the user's file system. That was a game called Virus, where the 3D maze replicated your dir tree, in which you hunted viral invaders.
Some of the recent 3D engines (eg Q3) are getting good enough to do environments that would be fun to work in.
Oh, one more thing. MS appears to be positioning to bring out a 3D OS, that will kill off open software - because now MS/nvidia are partners, nvidia own most of the 3D accelleration IP, there are now no other viable 3D accellerator chips, the nvidia 3D chip used in the MS closed box platform will be essential to the OS, and every bit as closed as the PC chipsets are now. I also wouldn't be surprised if this very beautiful & desirable 'easy computing appliance' also happens to come with an 'improved & secure' enhanced MS-proprietry TCP/IP stack, that 'puts an end to all that hacker/virus nastiness' - now that MS has built up the public fear factor (ie demand for a cure) with their deliberately vulnerable Outlook/Word/Windows. So with one blow, MS could win it all.
X-Box is a trial run of the closed box idea, ref palladium- www.activewin.com/articles/2002/pd.shtml and the comments on how to defeat bunnie-style attacks on a 'secure platform'. |
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egnor's 3Dwm link appears to be the loveliest of the recently updated implementations. |
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erlehmann; un-baked. Fusion is a desktop shell (rather, an extension to a desktop shell), and nothing like a 3dOS. Yet. As soon as a user can "walk away" from his/her desktop, hop in a virtual car, and mow down some virtual zombies, pause the game to answer some instant messages back on the desktop, visually reprogram my zombie car game with a 3d-drag-and-drop programming language, and then resume the "Dead Rush" rampage, I will consider the 3dOS idea baked. |
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guyd; A virus-free Microsoft? Do you write comedy often? You should! :D In fact, Macintosh sales are booming now that the public has seen the horror that is Vista. Microsoft's had (since the date of your 1995 post) ten years to come out with an operating system with 3d accelerated capabilities, and the best they can do requires over 1ghz, 1gb ram, and 128mb video to even get the 3d interface to TRY and show up? Descent 1 screamed on a hundredth of that, and Mac's Expose puts Vista's task switching to shame! Nevermind that the UAC all but cripples the operating system. |
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Humankind can do much better. None of this is baked yet. |
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yes, [JHC], it's pretty exciting stuff for us on the
virtual world, VR front. |
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