Using Ogre for 3D desktop?

[DennoCoil]

A gimmick I know, but is it possible to launch a Linux distro straight into a world-like environment and have the user interact with their apps through Ogre? Has this feature ever been tried before? What are the potential challenges?

[DennoCoil]

Did a search and found this library right here that displays web pages in a 3D environment.

http://princeofcode.com/navilibrary.php

Will try to look it up.

[areay]

I think they tried that in Jurassic Park. It didn't end well.

In answer to your question, yes, it can be done. How a user would interact with menus or choosing apps would be all up to you but you could do some nice things like redirecting the output from X windows into your app via GLX or something. I remember this subject being all the rage in the 90's, there were heaps of interactive desktop mods and "virtual world" type applications. I think there are even some Ogre projects in the show case thread that do something a little bit similar

http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=76211
http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=64822

[Klaim]

I think they tried that in Jurassic Park. It didn't end well.

It was not invented in Jurassic Park, it's a real Unix based OS. http://movies.stackexchange.com/questio ... -park-real

Yes, it is absoluely a real Unix system, it was a Silicon Graphics workstation (using IRIX, the SGI System V based Unix) running a three dimensional file system browser.

Silicon Graphics were early developers of hardware acceleration for 3D graphics, so it makes complete sense that even in 1993 they had Unix workstations capable of a 3D file system viewer.

The fact that the SGI logo is visible on the monitor, makes me wonder whether this was an example of product placement.

[cord]

With a newer linux kernel, kernel mode setting, wayland, etc. you could imagine an Ogre Render System that could simplify things for you, by eliminating the X server from the system. The kernel has the graphics driver and the graphics mode is set very early on in the startup sequence. So if the machine is dedicated to running your 3D environment, like an arcade machine, it might be nice to have something like this.

Something similar is possible even with older kernels and the fbdev driver, but it didn't have good 3D acceleration.