Touring Sun's 3D desktop

LOOKING GLASS

Article from Issue 79/2007

Author(s): FABRIZIO CIACCHI

The Looking Glass 3D desktop environment offers an exotic new view of your workspace.

The 3D graphic desktop is a popular topic in the Linux community. Tools such as Compiz [1] and Beryl [2] (on XGL or AIGLX) provide some interesting 3D effects, but these tools have only begun to explore the possibilities of using the third dimension to display and organize information. One of the first – and one of the most sophisticated – projects dedicated to unlocking the potential of the 3D environment is Looking Glass [3]. The Looking Glass project (LG3D) was created by a Sun programmer, Hideya Kawahara, who began writing it in his spare time on a Linux laptop. Hideya showed the project to his superiors at Sun, and they assigned a team of developers to help him create this new 3D world. Looking Glass is built on top of Java 3D technology and includes some special LG3D libraries for generating 3D effects.

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