Encapsulation of local application windows

From another thread, I think this needs its own thread.

VNC can be used to do it cross-platform. On Linux, I'd use X11 directly.

Actually, Project Looking Glass is doing it already with X11. It's a 3D desktop from Sun. On WindowsXP, SphereXP does it too - altough I fear the solution is always to make a snapshot of the window for 3D and bring up the actual window when the user interacts.

The problem with VNC is that it's optimised for a high latency, low bandwidth environment. Since it's operating as a "screen scraper", it has to does a lot of work comparing bitmaps to reduce the transfers, and all that would be more or less wasted. At the same time it's very low level , so that rapidly changing displays would be strobed to hell and gone.

The new graphics interface in Vista may change that, but it possibly won't be compatible with OpenGL final rendering. Microsoft's relationship to OpenGL has been prickly at best.

A Linux client, on the other hand, would work very well. You could pretty much use Second Life as your window manager.

Looking Glass is Java based, it's a completely new API, not compatible with X11, and there's only the Java and a less-up-to-date C++ API. There's an X11 server implemented so you can embed X11 clients in it, which is what you'd be doing with Second Life... but they're not native Looking Glass apps.

If something like this was implemented, I think it would be a good idea to make the applications run sandboxed.

There is no question in my mind but that if the application were specified by the server in any way, it would be a terrible security hole. For most applications of interest, sandboxing them to the point where they could be considered secure would render them pretty much useless.

What I'm talking about isn't anything like that. I'm not suggesting llRunApplication("Internet Explorer","http://virushq.com/infectme.asp";.

I'm suggesting something more like the current "media texture". You would be able to specify that this face of this prim would be available as a display surface. For example, llWindowManager("browser",0);, to indicate that face 0 would be a surface named "browser". Then (using preferences, or by dragging an icon into a folder or other container, or however seems least astonishing) they'd be able to specify the program and arguments that THEY would use for "browser".

So now, when they look at a "browser" prim and it's within the "embedding range", they'd see the icon on the specified face, and they'd be able to click the icon and it'd encapsulate the program's window in the prim surface.

There's no security concern, there, because there's no mechanism for an attacker to launch a program from LSL or pass bad data to it. It would be no different than running SL in a window and having the browser window next to it, except that it'd give you a more immersive environment.

Yeah, I was thinking something like that too. But with an option to have an access list of people that would be allowed to stream the application window from you and maybe interact with it, like forwarding key and mouse input from their SL client to the application.