3D OS-bonanza

I'm never going to forget the scene in Jurassic Park where young girl says "It's a UNIX system! I know this!" and starts clicking away in some crazy ass 3D-environment.

It always seemed to me like a ridiculous hollywood-idea, but looking into the subject I found that it actually existed, at least as a prototype. It was called FSN and was developed by Silicon Graphics Inc, but never released commercially.




Let's look at a few other alternatives:

Doom as a system administrator-tool. Assume I don't have to mention the awesome graphics, but is somewhat limited (it seems to mainly deal with "killing" processes).







3Dsia, a project devoted to make William Gibsons (the inventor of cyberspace) ideas of a VR-based system come true. Apart from a terrible name it also seems to have a really confusing interface.








Developed by Packard Bell for Windows 95 and with the highly original name Navigator, this system is based on representational visualization where a set of "rooms" and their contents represent different desktops.







As for Mac OSX there are some different alternatives. One is simply called 3DOSX and has a heavily psychodelic feel to it and probably eats super-computers for brekkie. Not so sure of the usability aspect, but nice light-effects.






Another one is actually a fully developed, commercial app called 3D-space VFS (for visual file system.. imaginative guys apparently). I actually tried this one and it's both cool and easy to use, although nothing more than a pretty finder.





Okay, all of these are fairly old and outdated (save 3D-space), but it still gives us an idea of how difficult it is to develope a working OS in a three dimensional environment.

But still, that still ought to be where we're going to end up, right?