This is a proof of concept for using Unity to produce a 3D replacement for the Windows desktop. This isn’t about 3D’ifying the windows themselves. This is more about just having a 3D scene be the desktop background. There are no icons yet, I intend on doing those next.
I basically took Nikko’s 3d ocean demo and turned it into an animated 3d wallpaper. I only chose this because it’s a good excuse to work on doing something like this. I fully intend to do my own scenes for this in the future, however. After I’ve got all working as I want it to.
I regret that I am, at this time, unable to do this on the Mac. Doing this at all requires OS specific native code plugins. Basically, I’m cutting the window’s frame off and forcing it to resize to the desktop. Unity does not seem to automatically change the resolution, so the program is trying to set itself to the resolution of the desktop. This obviously fails but Unity seems to automatically get as close as possible. It then upscales to the final resolution. At least this way the upscaling isn’t as bad as if it were upscaling from 640x480.
Since I can’t get the file attachment thing to work properly here, I’m posting a link instead.
Looks pretty, but there’s a massive amount of flickering on screen when it’s running. I just played around with it on Windows 7. Might not happen for other versions of Windows. Just letting you know.
there was a program that takes your desktop icons and throw them in a 3d room , you can take them and drag them too and launch the application , it was fun tho
so i guess the concept is already proven
That one was called BumpTop 3D or something to that effect. I really like the idea itself, but like someone else mentioned, untill I cant actually feel it hogging my system resources, I will have to stick with the normal Windows7 desktop. Or switch to Linux which does awesome 3D bling bling stuff with desktops seemingly smooth
Yeah, I’ve actually thought about this myself. My brother knows a lot more on the subject, but he can attach practically any program to the desktop. He made his own dreamscape kind of thing for XP a while back. (he’s learned a lot of this stuff being that he’s making an LCARS based shell for windows) Effectively any program can run in the back like that. I’m not sure if it removes the desktop icons or not the way he does it though.
As far as speed, it shouldn’t be that much of a drag if you have a multi-core system. My quad core runs absolutely perfect with a dreamscape scene running in the background, even while it was converting a video using a FFMPEG based app. No chopiness, so I don’t think a simple graphics scene would cause any problems. No worse then any other game running in windowed mode.
