Project Looking Glass

Despite the use of graphics acceleration features, the desktop explores the use of 3D windowing capabilities for both existing application programs and ones specifically designed for Looking Glass.

[2][3] Looking Glass was first developed by Hideya Kawahara, a Sun programmer who wrote it in his spare time on a Linux laptop.

After demonstrating an early version to Sun executives, he was assigned to it full-time with a dedicated team and open sourced the project.

[6] Regardless of the threat, Sun determined that the project was not a priority and decided not to put more resource to develop it to product quality.

However, user interaction models of TaskGallery and Croquet are based on virtual reality-like experience where the user moves inside the 3D space to perform tasks, whereas Looking Glass retains the operational model of today's desktop (i.e. no walking around inside the 3D space) and uses 3D effects selectively where they are thought to be effective.