Project : in-situ

Section: Software

Keywords : Window management, window system, OpenGL, X Window.

The Metisse window system

Participants : Olivier Chapuis [correspondant], Nicolas Roussel.

Metisse [5] is a window system that facilitates the design, implementation and evaluation of innovative window management techniques. The Metisse architecture is uses a compositing approach, making a clear distinction between rendering and the interactive compositing process. The Metisse server is a modified X server that can render application windows off-screen. The default compositor is a combination of a slightly modified version of a standard X window manager, FVWM, combined with an interactive viewer application called FvwmCompositor.

FvwmCompositor uses OpenGL to display windows. This library 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 4, 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 or 3D (Figure 4, middle and right).

Figure 4. 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).

Metisse has been used by Mekensleep( http://www.mekensleep.com/) to develop Poker3D, a multiplayer poker game. This application acts as a new compositor and uses the Metisse server to integrate external applications and 2D GTK+ interfaces into its OpenGL-based 3D scene (Figure 5). Metisse is similarly used by the ALCOVE INRIA project to integrate standard applications into their Spin|3D [55] collaborative platform.

Figure 5. Poker3D as a Metisse compositor: windows containing GTK+ interface elements are rendered by the Metisse server and displayed by Poker3D on top of the 3D scene.

Metisse is implemented in C and C++. It compiles and runs on Linux and Mac OS X and is freely available under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It is currently being integrated into a major Linux distribution. For more information, see http://insitu.lri.fr/metisse/.