Dynamic GUI Window Redirection?

Chris Tyler asks: "Picture this: you're sitting on the couch surfing on your tablet. You find something interesting (or funny or informative), so you say, "Hey! Look at this!" and send the window to the video projector shining on one of your walls. Or you are surfing for a hotel reservation and want to show it to your spouse before you click on 'book it'. Or you're viewing a report on your PC and the captain orders, 'on viewscreen!' With viable tablet PCs inching ever so slowly towards market, 802.11b an established technology, and more programmable pixels blinking at us then ever before, redirection capability for GUI windows will become a more and more desirable feature. X11 has some great network capabilities, but doesn't easily send to multiple displays or enable a window to be switched between displays. VNC is cross-platform and does permit disconnect/reconnect, connection initiation from either end, colourdepth mapping, and multiple views of the same desktop, but it is desktop-oriented (as opposed to window-oriented) in most implementations. Are there any good solutions for dynamic window redirection? What features would a good redirection solution include?"

Possible Solution?

[genomancer]

Ok, so I suspect this isn't feasable, but I have two monitors set up with an ajoined desktop, and I can drag/send windows between different desktops.. so couldn't you map two different desktops to two different devices and just move things between them?

G

Indirection

[crow]

This is a great idea. It would be wonderful if X were designed to allow applications to dynamically change their display setting, or even talk to more than one X server at once.

In most cases, it would simply be a matter of hacking the X library to allow you to close the connection to the server and open a new one (presumably to a different server). There might be some issues with having your resources suddenly change (you know, the stuff in places like ~/.Xdefaults). There might be a lot of issues of font support being different on the other server. There might be issues of assumptions that the server knows what windows you already have open. And it doesn't let you display on two servers at once.

With the current architecture of X, probably the best solution is a vnc-like virtual X server. This would be what your applications talk to, and it would open connections to zero or more real X servers. (No reason to require a real X server all the time, is there?) This is very similar to VNC, except that it's done on a per-window basis and talks X protocol to the real display server. Now we just need someone to write it.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Minority Report Interfaces

[khkramer]

You mention the interfaces in Minority Report...

That stuff was done by this guy [google.com]. His non-movie work is perhaps even cooler,
given the constraints of building things that actually work:

Luminous Room [mit.edu]