LiveBackgroundSandbox

Live Backgrounds in a semi 3D environment like Looking Glass can provide end users with information about everyday real world events. In many ways, end users will find Looking Glass informative and simple when they can look at the desktop and with one glance know that it is raining outside. The live wallpaper will change and have animated rain and sound to go with it. We can add 3D objects to a house that will show wind direction, speed and temperature. The scenary can change according to how dark it is outside and the moon can come out with the proper phase. All these visual clues can make it easy for first time user to become accustom to Looking Glass very quickly.

Live Background themes can also provide user with current events around the world. A 3D background can have a live newspaper in front of a door with headlines like "Three people shot in train station", when the user clicks on the paper the browser opens up with his favorite news site. We can have multiple newspapers representing different news sites stacked in a glass container like you see in the city, except you don't have to pay for it. There can be many more ideas behind Live Backgrounds like for music listeners a background with a music store with TV sets can show music videos and the user can click on a TV set to listen to that video on the desktop.

As for Instant Messaging you can have people walking in the street each representing an Instant message buddy. Just clicking on him will notify your buddy that you want to talk. Of course, some of these concept may be far into the future as the processor and video cards of today may be overwhelmed with 3D animation and videos. However, we can implement the initial building blocks of a 3D community of tomorrow.(qgonjon)

Live Background Ideas below

As for now, even though work has already begun on 3D backgrounds by paulby, how about enabling a web-cam stream to be placed on the background. If it updates every 5 minutes or so it won't even be much of a load on modem users. (ddew)

Another thing is to have a 3D object, much as the newspaper idea, but with custom rss-feeds. I'd love to have slashdot etc on the desktop without having to open a feed-reader or browser. (ddew)

How about a 3D background of Times Sqaure with your configured RSS feeds scrolling across the ticker? That would rock! (donnieb) I AGREE! (qgonjon)

Being one of the 'Sci-fi' people, I absolutely see this stuff as the future! I had a couple of ideas here.

1. A starship bridge. The obligatory large screen could be configured to display system stats (temp, used ram, etc) or RSS feeds, news sites, etc. Hitting your comm officer would bring up IM or Firefox, Security would bring up a console, etc. Have basic animated sprite type things for these guys to cut sysreq's. These could almost function in place of the taskbar problem with gaim and such...
2. NASA Mission control panorama, either current or Apollo-era. Same ideas here. (pythe - 23 Jan 2005)