Thursday, December 14, 2006

WPF: Interactive 2D controls on 3D

The WPF 3D community has been buzzing this week about something new that was announced yesterday.  Describing the news in advance, Daniel Lehenbauer said, "something incredibly important is going to be announced tomorrow afternoon" and "Trust me, you DO NOT want to miss this."  In Tim Sneath's preview, he described it as an "exciting announcement".

So what was the big news?  The ability to interact with a 2D control placed in 3D space.

As you can probably tell, I'm a little underwhelmed.

Don't get me wrong -- I agree this is incredibly cool.  It makes a great demo.

But the actual usefulness of this feature is not immediately obvious to me.  Personally, I've never yearned to wrap a combo box around a sphere.

When I saw the pre-announcement hints, I hoped it would be something else.  Like maybe support for volumetric textures?  :-)

As it is, this feature reminds me of the time I wrote code to allow AbiWord to flow text into a circular container.  Nifty for demos, but what am I going to use this for?