alex diavatis | December 19, 2012

Putting some depth to GNOME Shell ?

This post was made with another stylesheet and it might be messed up!

gnome_perspective_smallGNOME Shell is too modern to be 2D, isn’t it?

Gevera had an idea to create a depth illusion through a transition, when we open Shell Overview. While this isn’t practical it could be aesthetically pleasant at least to some people. 

Pseudo-3D in Shell

There is already a sense of 3D in GNOME 3, when Minimized got substituted with Sink. You need depth to sink something, don’t you? Sink a window works with middle-click on the Title Bar (if someone doesn’t know it). There is also the impressive Coverflow Extension that tries to give a 3D visual.

coverflow

The goal of this mockup is to give the illusion of the depth through a “perspective” transition.

far-away-bash

GNOME Perspective Mockup

This is by Gevera and you can find the original post in the Forums.

gnome_perspective_wall

Gnome_Shell_Perspective

From the very first time i used Gnome Shell I had this feeling of volume or you might call it 3D. It looked different then gnome 2. I came up with this 3D perspective thing in overview mode, where the wallpaper will scale down to the center of the screen giving an overall sense of depth.

At the end the idea is that using openCV and head tracking system, the perspective will change according to the position of the head of the user left/right, up/down, closer/farther. I have made a mockup so yo u can see what i’m saying. As they say, picture is worth a thousands words Tell me guys, what do you think?

I would be curious to see such an effect, thought an Extension :)

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  • http://varemenos.com/ Adonis K. (Varemenos)

    I like it. But it needs a lot of work to be able to work for all the wallpapers out there

    • Gevera

      What a surprise…didn’t expect to see my idea on the website =) it’s cool. Thank you, Alex.
      Adonis, i think the are two solution for the 3d perspective effect to work. First one using wallpapers in high resolution wallpapers. When you in a normal state, your desktop is focused on the center of the image. Once we are in the overview mode, wallpaper zooms out showing the whole picture. This way we can simulate the depth. Another way to do it it will be more complicated, but i guess will be more closer to the original idea, where the planes surrounding the image will be colored into a gradient from lighter to darker color of the main color of the image, while the perspective lines will get the color of the contrast. This may sound more complicated than it actually is, i will create a sample for clarity.Check it on my post in the forum.

      • alex285

        I didn’t also expect to see your “Perspective” Wallpaper, coz we have done something similar in 3D, for another purpose -with Gnome3 background :)

  • Rho

    Hi, sorry for the silly question, but I have a laptop working with a touchpad… no middle click then… but dude, I really want to try the sink thing now!!! :P

    Any ideas of how can I try it?
    Thanks :)