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3D Window Manager

mite51
Honored Guest
http://share.myflare.com/8vnmy3

This is something I've been working on for a while and its far enough along that I want to get some feedback. Its a 3D windows manager for the oculus, currently named 3DWM, but I am thinking of calling "WorkSphere". The goal is to re-create the desktop environment in 3D and allow the placement of windows on a virtual sphere around the user, a virtualized multimonitor setup(?). Ideally ( eventually ) a user should be able to work and use windows while using the oculus, hopefully making the oculus able to replace the monitor entirely.

I am happy with the progress so far, but there still a lot of work to do. If you try it out please let me know how it goes. Be sure to read the Notes.txt file included in archive in the link above.

mite51@hotmail.com
J
47 REPLIES 47

mite51
Honored Guest
I use hooks, so anti virus programs will probably have varying degrees of issues. I use a hooking API from madshi.net, which also unfortunately also gets used by malware. So the first possibility is that the antivirus removed some files for you, do you have all the same files on disk as in the archive?

Does pressing ctrl+alt+shift help? That will recenter the view.

One thing you could try, if you power off the oculus and then run the app and skip past the "oculus not detected" message box... Do you still see only blue?

Thanks for the feedback, I want to work through these issues so people are at least able to try it out 😉
J

Parias
Honored Guest
This is really cool - thanks! Exactly the kind of concept I want out of a virtual desktop manager - the ability to go beyond just a limited set of display surfaces.

I played around for a bit and it worked okay on my Windows 7 x64 install, but I did run into a weird bug (not sure if this is related or not). I use a custom theme (DarkGamma Matter Ray) which doesn't seem to entirely agree with 3DWM. When I exit, my start button is stuck looking like this:

http://i.imgur.com/s2FVXoy.png

If I restart the Desktop Window Manager service, the gray start button then covers almost the entire horizontal area of my taskbar - a weird effect.

This is neat otherwise. I'd love to see some scaling options for the future, and perhaps a way to more precisely control windows (I had a bit of a tough time snagging the corners in VR to move them around or resize them). I hope this keeps up development.

mite51
Honored Guest
I am relieved to hear it worked for you. Thanks for pointing out the windows start button issue, I had noticed but it wasn't on my todo list, now it is 😉 Its nothing to do with your theme, it just happens for some reason, hopefully with some digging I will find the cause.

I am going to continue developing, and I plan to add some scaling options in a new control panel. I was only going to provide a single slider to control the size of the desktop area on the surface of the sphere, all other scale would be derived from that. And of course the size of the sphere and how close the camera is to one side of the sphere, all of which will affect the apparent scale in slightly different ways.

I'll also look into the resize issue. However, I don't think its a bug, between the scaling and the low resolution I think its just harder. Perhaps some kind of sticky mouse movement would help...

Protocol7
Heroic Explorer
"mite51" wrote:
So the first possibility is that the antivirus removed some files for you, do you have all the same files on disk as in the archive?


Yes, I disabled the antivirus and extracted and tried to run it.

Does pressing ctrl+alt+shift help? That will recenter the view.

No change is observable

One thing you could try, if you power off the oculus and then run the app and skip past the "oculus not detected" message box... Do you still see only blue?
Yes

I'm running Windows 8 64 bit.

mite51
Honored Guest
I am going to PM you to debug this more.

mite51
Honored Guest
New build! Be sure to read the README.txt
link --> http://share.myflare.com/zRGKdL

Mostly a lot of bug fixes but the major new features include:
-out of sight mouse position indicator
-a control panel to tune some basic parameters real-time
-spherical mapping ( though now that its done I will probably switch to cylindrical )
-a panoramic background image

There are still plenty of issues, but here's whats on my todo list:
( ) figure out issue with multiple adapters
( ) figure out windows (7?) start button issue
( ) why does the desktop get stomped?
( ) drag/drop support
( ) if there is a capture window and the lbutton is down, use the captured window cursor
( ) render improvements
( ) Kinect 2 and LEAP support

Try it out and let me know how it goes and if there is some feature or bug that you think needs priority attention. Also, its quite a bit larger this time, 95% of that is the panoramic texture 😉
J

tola5
Explorer
Hi I get a system error the program can't start because MSVCR100D.dll is missing runing Windows 10 but is was the same on Windows 8.1

mite51
Honored Guest
Thanks, I'll try it out. I'll have to install Windows 8.1 or 10. In the mean time you could try to install the msvc runtime and see if it makes the problem go away.
32 bit
http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=5555
64 bit
http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=14632
J

tola5
Explorer
Hi thx for you will take the time to look at it
I try the link got "A newer version of Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable has been detected on the machine." 🙂

mite51
Honored Guest
Was a silly mistake on my part, one of the exe files was compiled in debug and was looking for debug libraries. Anyway, rebuilt and repacked, here's a new link that should work better.

http://share.myflare.com/4g3LN5

I haven't tried Windows 10 yet, so I cant say for sure it if will work there.
J