What if windows were translucent so that you could see the multiple windows you're working on at the same time? What if you could tack a note to yourself right on the Web page you're viewing? What if your CD or movie database became a 3D jukebox, where titles were joined with images to make finding what you want easier than ever?
- http://wwws.sun.com/software/looking_glass/
Project Looking Glass started from humble beginnings as the personal project of Hideya Kawahara, a Sun Engineer. It was demonstrated publicly by Jonathan Schwartz at Sun Networks 2003 in San Francisco, and since then has gathered momentum in development. The project has been touted at every subsequent Sun Network events and also at Comdex. The response has also been favourable.
The project is to design a 3-dimensional windowing environment for Unix-like systems. To this end the key features of Looking Glass are;
- Translucent windows
- Z-dimension geometry for shading of windows
- A 3 dimensional "dock" widget for launching applications.
The windows are fully updateable even when translucent, minimised or even flipped horizontally or vertically. A minimised window can even update it's contents while present in the Dock.
In the summer of 2004 the decision was announced that Sun were making Looking Glass an Open Source project. To this end, an sdk was made available for developers. At time of writing, the codebase of the core application is at version 0.5.
Information courtesy of;
http://wwws.sun.com/software/looking_glass/
https://lg3d.dev.java.net/
http://www.theregister.co.uk