Sun Wants to Make Linux 3D
Sun Microsystems, a company that has been making noise lately in the Linux desktop market with StarOffice 7 and Java Desktop, is currently working on an experimental 3D successor to Java Desktop that they believe will change the way we interact with computers, and in the end elevate the popularity of Linux in general.
Looking Glass is still very much in the planning stage, but a demonstration on the Sun Web site offers a glimpse of what it could be capable of.
In the demonstration, Jonathan Schwartz, vice president of Sun's software group, increases the transparency of a window so that you can see through it, turns a window on its side so that it sits at the edge of a screen like a book on a book shelf, turns a window completely around and leaves a note on the back, and takes a database of CDs presented as physical CDs, that you flip through, reading the labels, just as you would with real CDs, until you locate the one you want.
Juan Carlos Soto, the head of Project Looking Glass says one of the company's motivations for this operating system is that most windowing environments were developed in the 70s and 80s and were designed for the limitations of the hardware at the time including computational, graphics system and memory limitations.
"One of the things we wanted to do was revisit the paradigm that's been around for a long time and unlock some of this [updated] capability of the hardware and create a more compelling and more useable experience for the desktop users. We believe the Linux desktop is a compelling desktop and there's no reason it should be standing still or following any other platform for features for the user, so we embarked on Looking Glass and we are rapidly working to formalize the implementation," Soto says.
Sun saw great potential in Looking Glass from its beginnings as an experimental proof of concept. "When we saw the prototype and saw a great opportunity, we built an engineering team around the idea. What we are doing is dissecting the original concept and rebuilding it using traditional desktop graphics technologies," Soto says.
While it certainly sounds like an attractive approach to an operating system, analysts say it's too early to say what impact (if any) Looking Glass could have on Linux or the general operating system market. Tom Murphy, senior program director at Meta Group, wants to know what they will do with it.
"I think in and of itself, it has a big wow effect. It's cute to see these things like 3D animations of stuff moving around and think of collaborative space, but how does it make my business more productive?" Murphy wonders. He believes, they need to tie the product to business productivity to make it successful. "As it's shown (in the demonstration), if it's not going to make me more productive, then who cares?"
