The next project is all about 3D UI. I reworked my rendering platform to support mapping 2D UI onto textures mapped to meshes and render all of the 2D UI using Direct3D. Little known fact, modern day video cards are actually a 2D video card glued onto a 3D video card. They are designed to run in either mode, but not both at the same time. So, if your program renders in 2D using GDI then tries to render in Direct3D it will be slow. For the sake of performance, my entire rendering platform can run completely in GDI or in Direct3D. Why bother with all of this work? The answer is simple pixel shaders. Probably the coolest example of parallelism since the texture pipeline. With pixel shaders, my software can do photoshop-style layer effects real-time. Blurs, sepia, drop shadow, bloom, saturate, etc. can all be used between layers of UI. Plus I can incoporate live data into the rendering, such as light sources and do bump mapping.

This is not a well travelled space so I would like feedback on some UI ideas. Let me know if you think either of these ideas would make software better:
* blur/fade - fade in new UI while going from a blurred image to an in-focus image
* mouse light cursor - use the mouse as a subtle source of light that well effect the brightness of the UI, could be really compelling with bump mapped images

What do you think would be a compelling use of 3D?

p.s. go check out Andalib Desktop it is using the 3D rendering platform.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 at 6:51 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.