Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Looking Glass

V

Vinko

Demos

Like Watch later Share YouTube

Cited on HN 3 times, 2010–2022, never outright recommended score 0

Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Referenced as an example of an innovative, ahead-of-its-time desktop interface.

A short demo of Sun Microsystems' Looking Glass, a 3D desktop GUI concept for a future operating system.

3 citations · Demos · partly dated

GUI, HCI & interface historyOperating systems & kernels Demos Computing History & Culture

3 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

B

@bad_user Mar 2010 Cites it

on HN thread Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal

Project Looking Glass, while certainly inspired by current UIs, it was definitely not a clone ... pretty innovative actually, although it wasn't usable yet. You can take a look at a demo here: [this video]

Demo of Sun's innovative Looking Glass desktop

View on Hacker News

E

@exitb Jun 2022 Cites it

on HN thread Wayfire is a Wayland compositor based on wlroots

That’s a cool video, I’m also going to leave this here, from around the same time, but a totally different world: [this video]

View on Hacker News

T

@theCrowing Nov 2022 Cites it

on HN thread Lazy – A Capture Tool for Knowledge

Reminds me of the looking glass [0] demo from sun for the app itself there is sadly not much to see yet. closed beta. [0] [this video]

View on Hacker News

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.