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3D WAYLAND COMPOSITOR · C

shady

An experiment in treating desktop windows as objects in a shared 3D space.

Windows with depth

shady is built on wlroots and renders normal xdg-shell applications through a custom GLES2 3D pipeline. Windows can have depth, persistent rotation, solid shells, deformation, and projected shadows rather than behaving as flat rectangles attached to a plane.

Interaction

Ray picking follows transformed and wobble-deformed geometry. A first-person mode adds WASD movement, mouse look, jumping, grabbing, carrying, rotating, placing, and throwing windows. Optional gravity, floor contact, bounce, friction, and sliding make the desktop feel closer to a small 3D world.

Why it exists

The project asks a simple question: what does a Wayland desktop feel like when the compositor stops assuming that every window permanently belongs to a two-dimensional sheet?

View shady on GitHub ↗