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

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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 :)

Posted Fri, Jan 29 2010 12:10 PM by Nemo Krad
Filed under: , , , ,

Comments

Asa wrote re: 3D Desktop.....well the start of one...
on Fri, Jan 29 2010 1:47 PM

What would you use this for?

Nemo Krad wrote re: 3D Desktop.....well the start of one...
on Fri, Jan 29 2010 2:06 PM

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..

Asa wrote re: 3D Desktop.....well the start of one...
on Fri, Jan 29 2010 3:00 PM

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

Nemo Krad wrote re: 3D Desktop.....well the start of one...
on Fri, Jan 29 2010 3:21 PM

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

Martin wrote re: 3D Desktop.....well the start of one...
on Fri, Jan 29 2010 5:48 PM

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?

Nemo Krad wrote re: 3D Desktop.....well the start of one...
on Fri, Jan 29 2010 8:26 PM

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..

RandomChaos wrote DXTop
on Fri, Jan 29 2010 11:36 PM

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

LintfordPickle wrote re: 3D Desktop.....well the start of one...
on Fri, Jan 29 2010 11:39 PM

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!