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RandomChaos

3D Desktop.....well the start of one...

http://www.youtube.com/v/76TQONRrgM0 <p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/76TQONRrgM0">http://www.youtube.com/v/76TQONRrgM0</a></p>

I have been playing around with XNA using DWM, GDI and the good old Win32 API's and think I can create a kind of 3D desktop with them.

The intention is to also leverage the Windows 7 Multi Touch API as well so you will be able to gesture from one application to the next, extract and inject data from one application to the next, all off my XNA desktop.

I still have a number of glitches to iron out, and this clip shows the application just taking the current app that is in use and displaying a 2D representation of it in XNA. As you can imagine, now I have an image of a n application, I can now do anything I like with it in XNA.......Cool eh..

 As ever C&C welcome :)

Published Jan 29 2010, 12:10 PM by Nemo Krad
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Comments

 

Asa said:

What would you use this for?

January 29, 2010 1:47 PM
 

Nemo Krad said:

As I say in the description, I hope to create a kind of 3D desktop where you can use multi touch to manage your running apps..

January 29, 2010 2:06 PM
 

Asa said:

I guess I don't understand where the 3D comes into the 2D representation.

January 29, 2010 3:00 PM
 

Nemo Krad said:

Well, think about it, I have ANY and ALL applications that are running on my system as a dynamic real time updated texture.

I can render that texture on a mesh, I can put that object though vertex and pixel shaders....

I guess you will have to wait for the next post to see what I am trying to do, my fault for posting stuff as I do it... lol

January 29, 2010 3:21 PM
 

Martin said:

Wow, this is really cool. I've been investigating multi touch for a while with the intention to build something like this.

How do you fetch the images of the applications?

January 29, 2010 5:48 PM
 

Nemo Krad said:

Cool! Glad this may be of help to others.

I am using a combination of the DWM api ang GDI+ api to get the application thumbnail into a bitmap, then copy that to a Texture2D.

I have sped this up, as you can see in the clip it's a bit slow, I now have it at 60fps and about to get put it into 3D :) I hope to get another clip up tonight if I can..

January 29, 2010 8:26 PM
 

RandomChaos said:

[youtube]www.youtube.com/watch[/youtube] So, as I was saying in my earlier post

January 29, 2010 11:36 PM
 

LintfordPickle said:

An interesting change from the norm.  Reminds me of Compiz a little (http://tinyurl.com/yfunomu)

keep it up, and be sure to update us on the progress!

January 29, 2010 11:39 PM

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About Nemo Krad

Have been a professional developer since 1995. My skill set ranges from C/C++, VB6,MSSQL, Java Script, VB Script, HTML/ASP, Java, C#, ASP.NET as well as others. I started 3D and games development when the first release of XNA came out in December 2006 and have become addicted to it.