Re: The State Of The Art

["Dr Geek" <dr_geek hotmail com>]

hitchhiker <hitchhiker@cybermail.net> wrote:
>the cylinder is almost DONE.  the sphere would be a little harder.  we
>just need to take the next step and make a window manager that uses this
>as its standard instead of having someone go "hey...you know what I
>think would be cool?" and spending two weeks trying to tweak it.
>the only thing you're "missing" though is that a scalable sphere is
>nowhere near as simple as stringing a bunch of desktops together.
>that's going to take some thought and time.
Works thusly, I think (and I must get me to a drawing package pronto for 
some sketches):
It's not a completely freely rotating sphere.  Think of the 
chair-inside-a-wraparound-monitor idea.  You can only band your chair back 
until it points directly up; you can't go further up.  Similarly, you can 
only bend the seat forward until you're facing straight down.  Like flying a 
flight sim where you can't do vertical rolls.  This solves the problem of 
being able to roll around vertically until you see the opposite side of the 
sphere upside down.
You can scroll left or right with complete freedom.
In fact, to avoid nasty display problem, you can probably only move up to 
about 10 degrees short of vertical in the vertical plane.  All windows are 
oriented so that North (in old Motif terms) is up towards the top of the 
sphere.

dr geek


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