You'd have to have a big DLP or plasma monitor with a bunch of little pixels - but that's the way it seems to be going if Back to the Future III is any indication.

The ulitimate interface will jack right into the visual cortex (read Babylon 5). People lived in closets. The rich had holographic licenses that made the closet look like a mansion - the less endowed had licenses that made their closets look like - well - a closet.

Sometimes my projects require a lot of technical research - I run out of tabs or they get too crowded. Since I am hominid I readily distinguish colors and patterns that a document or form might have. So it makes some sense, if one does a bunch of research and cross checking - or just wants to watch Dr. Phil while they code!

But as far as a desktop housekeeping app - like a mechanical engineer - I agree the fewer moving parts the better. The smaller the better - the less clock the better (and no grids:-) - the more VFP the better!

>MS Research has been working on this for some time. They dropped some cool demos to us once in a while mainly showing rendering when moving around.
>
>IMHO...with the current hardware state I just don't see it. It's hard to "reach around" objects that completely cover others. The metaphor is just too radical. Plus, the CPU cycling that would be going on for a 3D UI is just off the meter. Maybe sometime after 2010?
>
>
>>Yeah, 3-D desktops could be the wave of the future. Great concept... implementations are a little shakey at the moment though.
>>
>>http://www.hamar.sk/sphere/screenshots.htm
>>
>>http://www.sun.com/software/looking_glass/details.xml
>>
>>http://desk3d.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php
>>
>>...I've actually tried the XPSphere out. Works well, but it doesn't update the images of forms placed on the sphere in real time. Still was fun to test drive. The looking glass project by Sun has some pretty impressive videos.
>>
>>>I think it it is cool:
>>>http://www.akihabaranews.com/en/news_10018.html