This is something I posted in the thread about animated backgrounds, but I believe could be a new topic.

Actually, you can take advantage of the 3D abilities of every video card out there, and not just for eyecandy sake, which is something many people find disturbing.
One of the most unpleasant things you must do in a windowing environment is clipping. That is, taking care of which parts of the screen need a redraw, when things move. Now, imagine that you use the graphics card's capabilities to map windows bitmaps as textures into polygons (usually, a pair of coupled triangles do as a rectangle). There you have it: You can really depth-arrange windows in real three dimensions, flashy "flight" effects included.
There's more: Thanks to the graphics abilities to reescale bitmaps, bilinear filtering included, you can resize windows doing nothing compute-wise. Imagine the speed gain.
This is what Microsoft is doing in their new "Longhorn", "Aero", whatever user interface: At last, use the graphics abilities every computer now has, and that are only catered for by video games.
Now, let's wonder: David ("zapek" Gerber, ambient's programmer), can this concept work in MorphOS' desktop? Are Intuition's windows something abstract that can be rewritten, to make use of 3D hardware?

See ya!

Sun has something like that. Check it out:

Sun's looking glass

A nice thing but OTOH it invites you to get a messy desktop. 2d is just more handy. But as an option it is highly interesting.

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I think you haven't realized that all those flashy effects need not be in an 3D-aware ambient. I was only talking about taking advantage of the 3D harware functions, that would free GDI programmers from "clipping" slavery, for example. It's true that, when thinking about it, many people can't help but imagine those "flying" desktops. But the most interesting thing is that it still is a desktop, only that windows are more free. See here for example: It's a perfectly ordinaryy desktop metaphor, only that windows are not flat against the screen. The "look and feel" of the computer would be almost the same as we are used to.

Unfortunately Voodoo has a 256 pixel texture limitation. Maybe on Radeons.

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Well, that *is* looking glass you were pointing me to. As said I think it's highly interesting. Thing is, if you want to rotate windows, then you must have some kind of depth arrangement (if not ist just a dull other scaling thing which would be easier achieved by iconized window views) or the other side of the window. Looking glass demonstrates this impressingly. They even attach notes on the backside of a window, but this is where the mess will just start.
If you are just able to turn a window then it does not take you very far. If you introduce 3D - do it really. Just like open glass.
Currently CGX and intuition are not capable of such a thing (probs are starting much earlier: smart/simple refresh). It will need deeper changes which are unlikely for the ABox, maybe we will see such things in Q one day...

an interesting concept..but not nececary i dont think......though it would be cool