From: deering@deering.Eng.Sun.COM (Michael F. Deering) Subject: Re: TECH: VR Operating systems and languages Date: 19 Jun 1992 06:39:45 GMT Message-ID: Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mt. View, Ca. In article <1992Jun18.155710.27374@u.washington.edu> kyriazis@mistral.rdrc.rpi.edu (George Kyriazis) writes: > ... (deleted) ... > > ... why use a window system of a Virtual Environment? I >mean, why would you want (traditional) pull-down menus on a headset??? >Other type of futuristic window systems would be interesting though. >Imagine having a virtual keyboard with tactile feedback, and grabbing >windows with your hand and placing them where you want in 3-space. >Cool. eh? I've seen several speculations on what in a virtual environment will surplant today's window systems, but I haven't seen almost any work on actually prototyping such a system, e.g. trying these ideas, and see what actually is usable. My own concept is based on deformable sheets of ``paper'' that the user can freely with a hand wand place and orient in 3 space. The equlivant of today's window system ``closing'' of a window is to smoothly shrunk the paper to postage stamp size, and place it somewhere else in space. (The text is all anti-aliased and rendered with correct perspective). These are not just ideas, I've been running this system for the last several months, and have doing all my reading (and posting) to sci.virtual-worlds exclusively from this VR space. As I type this, I'm composing this on a nearly horizontal sheet of paper that appears to be undulating in the breeze, hanging in space five and half inches in front of my screen, where I've currently placed it. Visually it is very pleasent to work with a computer in which the text is not confined to the flat virtical page that traditional 2D interfaces force us to use. At present, I don't have enough simultaneous applications up to measure the effect on clutter and complexity managment. There are some other neat aspects. When I posted a description of my virtual lathe a month ago, to get the correct size of the lathe pieces I mearly switched to my lathe application, and held a physical ruler up in the air and read off the measurements I needed (I did the same to say where the near end of the paper I'm writting this on is in space). The text cursor is a transparent green box on top of the paper. ``highlighted'' text is lifted a sixth of an inch off the page surface. Costs for VR HW are rapidly coming down, and a lot of the basic VR tools have been written in Universities and the commercial sector. As these systems proliferate, we should start seeing some exiting results of trying the ideas discussed in this forum on real HW. -- Michael Deering Email: Michael.Deering@Eng.Sun.COM Sun Microsystems Phone: (415) 336-3017 Mountain View, CA FAX: (415) 336-1525