| Then you could make the ball roll down towards the corner and drop into another window, of course! The NeWS window system let you reshape the entire framebuffer to any orientation or clipping, as well as individual windows and sub-windows, in the late 1980's. Why shouldn't I be able to lay down on my side next to a laptop and read a web page off the screen sideways, or adjust the rotation of the window to match the inclination of my pillow? The other thing I want the window manager to support (which NeWS couldn't do since PostScript only supports 2D affine transforms) is estimating my head position relative to the screen, and projecting the window in perspective so it looks rectangular from an oblique viewing angle, so I can watch a movie on an extra screen off to the side. If you could rotate windows around on the screen, Browser Ball should be able to use the laptop accelerometer to detect the true direction of gravity, and bounce the ball accordingly as you turned the windows and the laptop itself around. Unfortunately Apple stopped putting accelerometers in laptops with SSD drives, since they were only used to retract the heads when falling. You can do a lot of fun things by modeling and tracking the positions of multiple people's heads and multiple devices in augmented reality! Here are two people using two tablets, two laptops, and a desktop computer together with Pantomime: [1] [1] https://vimeo.com/149319403 |
The pseudo billboard idea is cute, but I wonder how it fares in readability on non HD screen (font rendering in 3D space may impede it, then viewing angles.). I'd love to see it done anyway, it's cute idea.
Another 'this is <year>' rant, we should have way more sensors on usb or i2c and have our laptops integrate with the real world more.