What dose everyone think about a 3D GUI?

It would be extreamly secure as it would allow the user to hide files and folders where ever they like in the environment.

Well just a thaught.

yes, but what if you forgot where something was? like in real life. and, how would you implement the filesystem?

otherwise, it's a good idea.

What about the underlying API's? A 3D gui might let you hide something from another user, but it won't hide something from apps that run in the background. (Plus, think of the spyware/adware that might happen when they realize they can put nice 3D signs all over your screen)

Also, how slow could that get? extremely.

A while back I thought M$ was planning to do something like that in Windows Longhorn. Recent screenshots of Longhorn don't show this, so maybe they decided not to. A 3d GUI would be cool, but before doing cool things you should always do useful things.
For example (this may not apply to you, it's just an example), why write a 3d GUI if you still need to create a network driver for your OS? And et cetera. But UCM is also right. Unless you have a state-of-the-art top-of-the-line PC- or a supercomputer - or unless your GUI sacrifices quality of graphics for speed - it will probably be as slow as a snail.

Well my idea was more along the lines of a layout.

Say you had the user define rooms instead of windows, and the rooms require keys to enter them, say a password or a uneak key asigned to administrative users.

Using this method would make it easy to create simple but detailed worlds without alot of overhead say 120 - 150 vertices for a room.
which is flea compared to the speed of assembly.

This would also make it easer to implement simple sprites for programs, files, folders and other objects.

Multitasking would be as simple as changing the camera view.

I wrote a simple 3D engine in Visual Basic which is practicly the slowest engine on the street. But it still handled 1K vertex models.

I guess what I'm saying is that the speed should'nt be an issue. Security only depends on the security of the operating system itself.
Just dont allow incomming apps to have access to system resources without user permission.

Well thanks for the input.

If you implement the GUI as a 2d instead(by not assigning volume or Z to the struct that you use to define these 'rooms' ) you should find the that the flat drawing operations would be a lot faster. But if I'm hearing you correctly it sounds like you are looking for some BSP, this would be way too slow to use as an operating system, and you would need to rely on users having large amounts of ram in order to multitask.

Yeah, then the user has to type the password every time an app does something with a file. Interesting idea, but too slow and too user-unfriendly. There are many interesting possibilities that would be cool, but are too slow and user-unfriendly. And, that type of interface would be more complicated than M$ Windows, right? That isn't our goal, is it?

Nice idea!
BTW, o friend of mine created once o GUI (for Windows) which was like a 3D game for children. You have some little robots who helps ypu with the files and folders. The folders are some big rooms and the files are some boxes. Nice sh!t. When you delete a file, you simple destroy that box, and so on.
Of course, it's very diffcult to create an OS like that.
But, GOOD LUCK!

________________________________
I want to cry.
Why? I don't know why.
Maybe it's her or maybe
I have something in my eye.

I do not see why an 3D GUI like that is hard to do...(if you have the drivers)

It is pretty easy but damn useless... just glamour and pretending...
NO real use whatsoever... a complete waste of CPU resources.

3D might be usefull for games and some applications but not for GUI.

Lately Microsoft has realized this and started to improve 2D interfaces for video board drivers, this is an implicit recognition that there is no need for a 3D GUI tomorrow.

BTW I am also from Romania

You know what would be really cool though? One of those 3D interfaces that the game systems use, like the Gamecube, PS2 or the XBox. When the operating system loads up you get a nice little spinning object that controls every destination you can take or something. If you made a completely game oriented operating system, it might be worth your time.

Of course, in order for it to work you would need to write your own operating system, but there's plenty of resources for that even here on this site. Alas, such an operating system probably wouldn't survive in a world dominated with business PC's but you never know if you don't try.

I was think about one of those for Dex4u OS .

GUI,security and filesystems are diferent things, and you also can hide a window in a 2D GUI.
For a hobby OS developper a 3D GUI is a very bad idea,it will take a lot of
develop time,is pretty useless ,and since is dificult for all of us to have
a 3d graphic accelarated drivers it will be so slow that nobody would use
the OS.
For industry is a excellent idea for selling newer and powerful computers.

I have to agree with Octavio

Besides the files are stored in HDD filesystems and only "presented" in a 2D or 3D GUI. The real search is done on the HDD

So be it 4D I will still be able to find the files with a simple 2D NCommander clone or a 1D command line tool

I wonder when this will stop (at molecular level?).. and even then, when will this end? after all, 4D is silly