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Qt 5 based 3D Wayland compositor

Samuel Rødal
Demos
YouTube
Cited on HN 4 times, 2013–2020, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Cited as an existing example of 3D or spatial desktop shells and what Wayland compositing makes possible.

A short demo of a 3D Wayland compositor built with Qt 5 and QtWayland, mapping input to and compositing the output of Wayland applications in a 3D scene, also running on a Raspberry Pi.

“The point of this demo is not practical usability today” (HN, 2020)

4 citations · Demos · intermediate · partly dated

4 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@drivebyacct2 May 2013 Cites it
on HN thread Meta: The Most Advanced Augmented Reality Interface
Skip X, jump to QML and QWayland. [this video] Take that and extrapolate. Doesn't seem that "crazy" really. Compiz and KWin both already have window animations you're describing. There was even a Wii-head-tracking plugin for compiz that would give your desktop a third perspective dimension. (Moving your head would reveal the edges/bits of the other windows underneath higher ones). It'd be a neat demo, but it sounds like a nightmare for daily usability, etc.
Demo of Qt 3D compositor as existing tech.
@bachback Oct 2013 Cites it
on HN thread NodeOS
Read more
here are my thoughts. there once was chromeOS, which was the idea to build an OS as a browser. more recently exobrowser is bootstrapping chrome via node. which means you can expose rendering methods. if you compare that with what different OS layers does, you might as well use the exposed rendering methods to expose your local data and services (=KDE/Gnome). so I would study Wayland for this first. there you learn render stuff to the screen speaking to the kernel. it's 100x easier than X11. I don't know KDE/Gnome internals but I would assume with Wayland some of it can be rebuild now (?). so you could then basically script the GUI perhaps in quite new ways. if you compare that to what the exobrowser is doing you get the picture. so coreOS => Docker => wayland. network servers are booted up from remote, so the network part is becoming more core. virtualization/containers allow for different isolation of processes which speak to the network. then you have a thin layer of display. so for example imagine hookup a oculus and having that as a kind of OS, see this demo [this video] the future is going to be cool ;)
Demo hinting at VR-style OS shells.
@mitchtbaum Oct 2018 Cites it
on HN thread The case for pair programming
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I've been pair programming for about 6 weeks now, over Discord. The calling and screen sharing functionalities work so well that my partners and I can join and part quickly and easily. We can get deeply into what we're doing individually. But collaboratively, we can solve problems that neither of us can do alone. I like this virtual setup for multi-user interaction a lot, and hope more tools, even ones specific to virtual programming environments, come for it soon. Tuple's making a remote sharing tool that looks interesting. What comes to mind for me is a shared 3D Wayland environment, like this [this video] so, hopefully more people will start focusing on [link] and other Rust desktop/handheld application level development.
Illustrates shared 3D desktop idea.
@vetinari Aug 2020 Cites it
on HN thread GTK 3.99
With wayland, you can do this and the apps won't notice because of the limits placed upon them earlier: [this video] Can macOS do it? The point of this demo is not practical usability today, but to demonstrate, that global positioning on the desktop as we know today might get much more complex in future. So why shut the door?
Demo of desktop positioning possibilities in Wayland.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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