[vos-d] What are some ideas for cool demos?

[Peter Amstutz]

On Fri, Mar 09, 2007 at 03:57:23PM -0500, Rob Meyers wrote:

> Right on.  One thing I had though about whiles back was coupling MAME 
> (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator?) directly into the space.  MAME case you 
> don't know plays all the old arcade games directly from the original ROM.  
> Anyhow, in this way you could have a real 80s style arcade, maybe have a 
> pool table in there as well? :)
>
> But that brings me to another question, can you import output from some 
> graphics buffer directly into CrystalSpace?  Such a technique could be used 
> to import all sort of already built apps, like a web browser.

Yes, Crystal Space supports rendering to textures, see 
http://interreality.org/projects/crystalzilla

(Regrettably this code has suffered from bit rot, to bring it into a 
more recent version of VOS would require a lot of work).

There's a number of approaches to bringing "legacy" 2D applications into 
3D.  For example, Croquet can act as a VNC client to display 2D 
applications in the 3D space [1] but this is an incomplete solution as I 
believe the application still needs to be running on the desktop 
somewhere.  A more interesting approach is integration with the X11 
Composite extension, such as has been done by Project Looking Glass [2] 
and Beryl [3], to actually take over the role of window manager and 
render all the X windows in 3D space.  Unfortunately this is very 
platform specific, i.e. I have no idea how you would get arbitrary 
Windows or OS X frames to render to an offscreen image.  If it were 
easy, you'd see more applications doing it.

[1] http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Image:Bloggingfrominworld.jpg
[2] http://www.sun.com/software/looking_glass/
[3] http://www.beryl-project.org/

-- 
[   Peter Amstutz  ][ tetron at interreality.org ][ peter.amstutz at gdit.com ]
[Lead Programmer][Interreality Project][Virtual Reality for the Internet]
[ VOS: Next Generation Internet Communication][ http://interreality.org ]
[ http://interreality.org/~tetron ][ pgpkey:  pgpkeys.mit.edu  18C21DF7 ]

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