I recently redescovered the keynote video in which Looking Glass was announced and realized it’s now 12 years old.
I remember watching this video in awe and still today I findit quite remarkable although a bit gimmicky.
https://youtu.be/JXv8VlpoK_g
I wonder what was the motivation behind this project and why it never really took off. Also what are the people behind it up to nowadays - does anyone here know the backstory to this?
I think there were two reasons for this:
- It looked cool, even if sometimes very impractical. Now it's a bit mundane but at the time it was like breaking the 3rd wall, we were so used to the flatness of the desktop that it was really weird to view it as a 3D object.
- Apple and Microsoft were in no rush to bring these features to their commercial OSs (and proably for good reasons, MS tried to have the 3D carousel in Vista but even that wasn't very useful). That meant that people in the Linux world in particular could show off "hey, can your Windows XP do that?"
But of course eventually we realized that 90% of these features were counter-productive so we only kept the bits that made sense (ability to scale down windows in real time easily to make thumbnails or previews, faster rendering, a bit of transparency etc...).
It also reminds me that I used to tweak a bunch of settings in OS X to speed up and disable animations, but I gave up years ago because Apple kept breaking them. Now I just use OS X with its default settings and stay away from things like Spaces that insist on cramming animations into my attention. That makes me sad, so I am going to go back to not thinking about it.
Recently found the "reduce motion" checkbox in System Preferences > Accessibility and instead of sliding it just does fade-in-place which is way less annoying and I think feels faster because you start to see the other window right away, even if there's a window fading away on top of it. The slide from desktop to desktop feels like I need a split second to orient myself after being spun in a chair.
I remember, circa 2005, there being compiz extensions that enabled something similar.
Virtual desktops which I believe linux supported long before spaces acquired a nice visual metaphor with compiz which allowed you to zoom out to see them all and drag windows between one and the other.
Windows could be set to have a small amount of resistance when passing other windows to make it easy to stick them side be size.
The effects for windows creation and destruction were quite cool and super configurable.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjQ4Nza34ak
Some good quality images of it running with my blog in the old days:
https://www.javipas.com/wp-content/lg1.jpg
https://www.javipas.com/wp-content/lg2.jpg
https://www.javipas.com/wp-content/lg3.jpg
https://www.javipas.com/wp-content/lg4.jpg
Desks provide much more creative value across the first two dimensions than the 3rd: you want the stuff you're working on within sight, touch and arm's reach. "Piling up" is a "storage" or "attention reducing" strategy because you can't work with the piled items or the content with your hands. You largely don't care what they even are unless you're working on them... so pushing virtual representations of work surfaces deeper down an imaginary z-axis makes little sense.
The demos in the video look fun and exciting, and probably justified the applause at the time. I think the desktop metaphor could be worked over. Tablets and phones dropped it from the get-go. But I'm yet to be convinced that visually arranging data across a projected third dimension except when you want to draw the user through (like in a game) adds much to the experience.
The flipping and "piling" you get in Windows and macOS seem like decent uses of 3D. Those effects basically just add+hide 2D surface. It's the vanishing-point stuff that seems gimmicky to me.
While not entirely convinced myself, I was persuaded to think that there might actually be some value in this after watching the various videos where people have built very large functional constructions in Minecraft. Watching the creators explain what they've done, and seeing how easy it is for them to navigate even tremendously complex and interlinked structures through reference to the relative positions of different pieces certainly makes it seem like there's something to it to me.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_(1995_video_game)
I was following this back then -- Apple had just come out with 3D manipulations in the desktop (e.g. turning a widget window around in dashboard around to view their configuration on the "other side").
Some engineer at Sun, in their spare time, put together a quick demo with 3D windows (using Java/OpenGL bindings IIRC). Basically a quick play on the idea of windows being objects rendered in a 3D space by a compositor (which OS X had introduced to the mainstream a while before).
OS X still rendered them as 2D projection, except for the occasional effect like the flip-around in 3D space, while this demo had them floating by default (but still only shown the same effects, flip around to write notes etc).
The Looking Glass demo was very basic, it got some talk in forums at the time, and it was even presented a few months later in a SUN "keynote". For a while they pretended like they had something there, instead of just a half-arsed demo.
There was never any big project around it, nor much thought. The highlight was ...turning a window around to write notes, configure, etc (e.g. a copy of what Apple had done commercially and already shipped with minor changes).
Even the very concept of Windows in 3D space is not that novel, Microsoft had done something similar before Apple, as well as others.
It didn't went anywhere, because (at least as implemented this far) it doesn't solve any problem better than the regular desktop.
In short: Looking Glass never went anywhere because it was a proof of concept by 1-2 Sun employees, when window compositing became possible in XWindows/Java.
Remember, Sun didn't do well after the dotcom boom and Sun wasn't cheap but Sun did invest a lot in desktop UNIX (Gnome HIG, documentation, internationalisation, and a major contributor with LOC). Sun GPLed this and many other things (among which Java itself and Solaris) right before they were sold out (to Oracle). We can only thank Jonathan Schwartz & Co for that because Oracle would've kept it proprietary (speculation though).
It isn't very innovative. It was one of the many window managers which did this. 3dwm, 3d desktop [1] [2] (from around 2002 IIRC), Beryl, Compiz, and Enlightenment (E17 & onward) are some other examples though not all of these were 3D accelerated.
As you said, the problem with this is its gimmicky; not productive. In gaming nice 3D effects can add something to the experience (immersion) but on a desktop it shouldn't be very noisy or abundant. So after the initial wow-effect was over these effects didn't get a long lasting stay in products.
[1] http://linuxreviews.org/features/3ddesktop/
[2] http://desk3d.sourceforge.net/
Things like that being gimmicky is not the major problem. The major problem is they rely on 3D hardware which (or its drivers probably) is always more or less quirky. I have not seen a single PC on which Compiz would perform reliably without occasional crashes and/or artifacts and I can see no practical reason for a window manager to use hardware 3D as window decorations are not that hard to render, alt+tab task-switching 3D cube is hardly useful and wobbly windows effect is not just useless but also annoying. I believe there should be a category of "wow! cool!" window managers with all kinds of Hollywood effects for fancy demos, cool kids, drivers debugging and concept experimentation but no serous distro should rely on them the way Canonical did cementing a Compiz into Unity.
At the same time I would love to try a WM like the one by the link running in a VR environment and controlled with old-school cyberpunk VR gloves or something.
https://web.archive.org/web/20000822012848/http://www.oreali...https://web.archive.org/web/20000822013028/http://www.oreali...https://web.archive.org/web/20000822013204/http://www.oreali...
Source code: (https://web.archive.org/web/20000131021557/http://www.oreali...)
My friend Nick McKinney and I borrowed $25k from a chiropractor and spent a year trying to get Linux users to replace X with Synapse (which was a paid offering that wasn't compatible with anything.) We had no idea what we were doing, no idea how to get customers, etc. So we gave up and released it as open source.
It was a lot of fun! I have tons of stories, but I gotta go because I am trying to prepare for a talk (currently posted on http://js.la/)
Xgl [1] was released in the same year and had quite similar capabilities [2]. Xgl, in turn, lead to Compiz/Beryl which is the technical ancestor of the most popular window managers we run on Linux desktops nowadays (e.g., Kwin in KDE).
So to some extent, we still use the tech which was developed back then, the effects are just a lot more subtle.
[1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xgl
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CgqWlX_GsI
There's acryllic everywhere too, which is blurry transparency, but you might not notice it either.
That said: I miss Compiz wobbly windows. They were cool.
Last I checked, Kwin still had that functionnality.
The difference is that both Looking Glass and Xgl works as an proxy X server. While AIGLX was an effort to make client-side libgl implementations usable from the X server itself, which is good for Acceleration of GLX in Indirect mode (hence AIGLX) but also as a general HW acceleration backend for things like XRender and XVideo (for example intel driver emulates XVideo in terms of OpenGL) and with addition of one simple OpenGL extension (ability to create GL texture from contents of X11 window/pixmap) allows all the 3D window manager tricks.
At the time it was pretty cutting edge and the demos made it seem very polished and useful. In actuality the live version was rough round the edges, fonts and rendering looked soft. It was definitely a proof of concept and didn't really have much breadth beyond the few use cases presented in the video above.
That said yes, it was very cool but even back in 2006 I and my classmates were questioning quite what you'd do with such a product. It seemed like a solution in search of a problem.
Also OS X 10.4 Tiger was when Apple's Mac platform became very solid indeed and started making inroads in academia and enterprise. Most of our professors for example switched from Linux to Mac around then.
I think Looking Glass failed then not just due to legal pressure from Apple but competitive pressure too. I also doubt Sun - which if memory serves had financial issues and was suffering diminishing sales of their SPARC platform - had the clout or will to invest in this particular project.