Named by InfoWorld as one of its "Innovators to Watch in 2005," Hideya Kawahara, Sun Senior Staff Engineer on Project Looking Glass, shared his insights on the 3D technology on the sun.com Web site.

Accident played a significant role in Kawahara's involvement with the 3D desktop. Work really got started, he said, when he dropped his laptop and replaced it with a more powerful computer that enabled him to begin exploring the 3D desktop on Linux. He said he found himself "energized" by the freedom to build that Linux provided.

Relatively unfamiliar with 3D technologies when he began work on Looking Glass, Kawahara avoided attempting to impose the desktop environment on the 3D space and instead took an alternative approach, breaking down 3D ideas and integrating them into the desktop one at a time. He found himself satisfied with the result.

The responses he received were mixed, Kawahara said, but not from Curtis Sasaki, Sun VP of Desktop Solutions, who arranged a demonstration for Jonathan Schwartz. The openness of people at the top to his new technology impressed him, Kawahara said, confirming his view of Sun as a company dedicated to innovation.

Kawahara said exploratory efforts are underway to determine how Project Looking Glass might be made available to the open source community. "3D desktop development is a new frontier," he said. With such a groundbreaking technology, enlisting as many fresh minds as possible to contribute to its development can only be an advantage, Kawahara said.

Would the Sun/Microsoft settlement affect Project Looking Glass in any way, Kawahara was asked. "I don't know," he said. "I consider myself very close to the open source community so there is no secret where my loyalties lie. But in the end, this is not about being anti-Microsoft, it's about pushing everyone to embrace new ways of thinking about how we interact with the computer most relevant to our everyday lives -- the PC." [...read more...]

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