Section: Software and Platforms

Metisse

Participant : Olivier Chapuis [correspondant] .

Metisse  [40] is a window system that facilitates the design, implementation and evaluation of innovative window management techniques. The system is based on a compositing approach, making a clear distinction between the rendering and the interactive compositing processes. The Metisse server is a modified X server that supports both input and output redirection. The default compositor is a combination of a slightly modified version of FVWM, a standard window manager, with an interactive viewer application called FvwmCompositor.

FvwmCompositor uses OpenGL to display windows, which offers a rich graphics model well adapted to the exploration of new window management techniques. Texture mapping, for example, makes it possible to transform the window shapes in real-time (Figure 6 , left). Alpha blending makes it easy to create translucent objects and shadows. Scaling, rotation and translation can also be used to position windows in 2D$\frac{1}{2}$ or 3D (Figure 6 , middle and right). Input redirection makes it still possible to interact with applications no matter the visual transformations applied to the windows. It also makes it possible to adapt, reconfigure or re-combine existing graphical interfaces  [48] . This year we used again Metisse to implement novel desktop interaction techniques [4] .

Figure 6. Sample window management techniques implemented with Metisse: extended paper metaphor (left), interactive table configuration that allows to duplicate and rotate windows (middle) and zoomable 3D desktop (right).

• Web: http://insitu.lri.fr/metisse/

• ACM: H.5.2 [User Interfaces]: Windowing systems

• Software benefit: see [40] , [48] , [41] , [44] and [4] .

• License: GPL

• Type of human computer interaction: Graphique

• OS/Middleware: X Window et Mac OS X

• Required library or software: OpenGL via nucleo (http://interaction.lille.inria.fr/~roussel/projects/nucleo/index.html ) and some usual C/C++ libraries

• Programming language: * C/C++