The Register is reporting that Microsoft Research are working on a 3D UI for the version of Windows after "Whistler".

Although it sounds cool on the surface, I feel extremely uneasy when I hear things like 'Windows can be "hung" in a room'. It brings back so many painful memories of Microsoft Bob ;p

so you mean the interfaces seen in "Hackers" may soon be a reality? :P

Man that was a l33t filesystem representation, with all the digital skyscrapers. :)

oh yeah i can see that heppening cerb

oh now where is that garbage file i copied
heheh

if the news poster had done more homework he would have found the 5 minute avi of the gui I watch about a month ago.

it really does look kinda gay and seems like it would take longer to do things than your normal desktop.
Its hardly the same leap from the command line to the gui was.

The goddam well better be an option not to turn it on cause it looks like it will use a fair bit of power you dont need to use as well :/

looks like windows continues to bloat

I don't think they ever claimed it's going to be faster to do things. Its all about improving visualisation ofthings to make more complex concepts understandable to the masses. If you already have no problems understanding commands like DIR to navigate through your HDD, then you don't need extra visualisation tools for that. If you want speed, use a command line. period.

explorer is so much faster to use than any command line for just about everything

only thing it blows for is renaming mulitple files

and i fail to see how a 3d gui would be any more logical than a 2d one, besides the filesystem is 2d anyway

maybe the windows gui is a little dated but making it 3d doesn't make sence to me

Heh, remember the file system used in Jurrasic park when the little girl "hacker" locks all the doors?
hahaha

hay cheque out might voice recognition soft where its berry cool

yeah but ummmmm.... will they have 3D crashing!??

t0e2t0e: have a look around the sgi.com site for an app called "fsn". it's the exact app used for the "security system" in JP. It's Irix based atmo, but I'm sure someone out there could port it to Linux at least. If not, I guess I could take a few shots of it off my sgi ;p

it'd be fun though :D

hey where can i use that "fsn" prog? like is there anywhere i can go that it will work and show me that s***

There's actually already a few 3d shells around. Some of them are pretty cool. Most of them (afaik) are OpenGL based, so are pretty decent if you've got a good 3d card.

I think the whole 3d UI thing is a little new, and needs to evolve a bit before people really get into it. A lot of them are done for purely aesthetic reasons, which is a pretty s***ty thing to do for an interface.

Check out:
http://www.3dtop.com/ss.htm
http://www.particlestreamstudios.com/europa/

There was another one, called Planets or Globes or something weird like that that I can't remember the domain name for. A great site for shells is http://www.desktopian.org - go check it out. Tin_omen da man.