“Alexander Feder is the project manager of 3Dsia, an open
source project with the goal of creating an innovative 3-D user
environment. 3Dsia is currently in the prototype stage.“
“How did development start on 3Dsia?”
“Alexander Feder: That was exactly 2 years ago. I spent my
holiday in Hawaii, and was thinking about a system which would
enable someone to compose music using data-gloves. So i worked out
some designs, but didn’t code anything yet.”
“After my holiday I started to work at “Ikarus Anti-Virus
Utilities” (a company in Vienna, Austria) as a trainee. There I met
Gerald Scheidl, who was a virus analyst at that time, and a Linux
freak as I was. Because I was a “trainee,” I had to do stuff
everybody else disliked to do. I had to type in virus-patterns by
hand, which was very boring, so I actually didn’t spend my time
typing in those stupid patterns, but talk with Gerald. :)”
“Very soon we realized that we had quite similar ideas. We
started talking about a Virtual Reality Shell, which would just
work as well as a normal Unix shell, but in 3D. File-system
visualization, Process-visualization, and so on, would be some of
this shell’s features.”
“So we developed some basic designs, the result was the first
prototype (the Stonehenge file system visualization). It was
actually a whole year after the development of the first prototype
that we went public. That was in December of 1999.”