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When I saw a few KDE 4 screenshots I was struck by the 3D look and was wondering about a 'what if' we could extend this paradigm further by implementing the desktop in true 3D. I know Apple is already working on this and was wondering wat would be needed to make this a reality.

My opinion is that since both the input (mouse) and output (monitor) are 2 dimensional the desktop built with 3-D elements will still be 2 dimensional in how it operates. The only advantage is that we will have some very cool 3-D effects, much nicer ones than we can get with even Compiz, such as true shadows and lighting which changes according to the time of day.

I've been trying to build a prototype of such an interface using Blender and its Game Engine, but since I'm not a real 3-D artists it encompasses both learing Blender and building the interface.

What would technically be needed to build a true 3-D interface? Well, first of all, the Qt library would have to be ported to OpenGL, if this hasn't been done already. Dropping X Windows altogether and switching to OpenGL completely would have my vote, but then we would need to leave a lot of apps behind. Porting XLib to OpenGL would be another option. After all this, we could start rebuilding the KDE widgets in true 3D using OpenGL.

Added tag to idea title.