Sun’s new 3-D look:
"A Web page appears to be transparent, allowing you to see the details of other pages behind it. Kawahara grabs the page with the mouse and stacks it sideways so that it becomes just one among several books on a shelf. Then he spins it around so that he can write a Post-it note on the back."
Interesting. And it’s one of the innovations through which Sun Microsystems, which has been losing money for nine of the past 11 quarters and is being "hounded by analysts to drastically downsize its workforce and rein in spending on research and development," hopes to use PCs to attract new business.
Kawahara is Hideya Kawahara and he’s the 33-year-old creator of Looking Glass, a 3-D effect he came up with as part of a crew creating desktop software for Linux, says thre Mercury News here, continuing that it seems he should be at Microsoft developing a future version of Windows software, but:
"I didn’t just want to follow Windows and do a better job chasing them," he says in the report. "It’s not as interesting to follow. We should dream some new world."
Since Kawahara’s work is aimed at PC buyers, it’s one of the few tangible, easily understood examples that Sun’s leaders can show to analysts and shareholders to demonstrate the company will get payback from research and development, the report says – "And since Kawahara did the programming on his own time, his work underscores the serendipitous nature of innovation."
The Looking Glass effect can be applied to Web browsers, word processing or any other desktop application.
Kawahara was born and educated in Japan but moved to Sun in 1997 as one of many programmers who began adapting Java so that it could run on cell phones and television set-top boxes. At the same time, he was studying 3-D graphics and "Looking Glass really got going after Kawahara dropped his laptop in October 2002," says the Mercury News.
He bought a new one with a 16" screen and on a whim, "loaded the Linux operating system onto it," says the Mercury New.
He created the 3-D software in his apartment and eventually, it reached Curtis Sasaki, a vp of desktop solutions. "We saw the potential," Sasaki said. "There hasn’t been any change to the way the desktop software looks since 1984."
Added Sun Chief Executive Scott McNealy, "It’s easy to duplicate a user interface that has been around for a lot of years, but it’s more interesting to innovate. An operating system isn’t like a car where the pedal has to be on the right hand side.”
Now Sasaki said that Sun hopes to make Looking Glass into a software platform other programmers can exploit to create new software for business and home use, says the report.
Sun executives believe fostering innovation like Kawahara’s work eventually will benefit Sun’s bottom line and accordingly, it’s begun filing patents on his work.
"The reason we zoomed in on this is that we think the desktop is going to go through a rebirth," says John Fowler, cto for Sun’s software division.
