Dev builds a unique 3D operating system for multitasking, gets terrible performance

A video making the rounds on X shows what's being called a "3D OS," built around a cube-shaped desktop. It looks like there is a window mapped to each of five faces, while the viewer's perspective sits on the sixth.

The user who posted it, kapilansh_twt, captioned it "I built the first 3D OS," though that claim isn't confirmed, and it's not clear whether they're the actual developer or just sharing someone else's project. Either way, it looks like a real custom build, not a mockup.

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In the clip, apps run on each face of the cube, and the demo drags a window from the right side across to the left, then down to the bottom, all on a normal 2D laptop screen. It's a neat trick of perspective, using rotation and depth to fake a spatial desktop without any headset involved. There seems to be some kind of head tracking involved, although that could very easily be faked using camera trickery.

The obvious catch is performance. Although no benchmark numbers are shown, the laptop is visibly struggling to keep the animation smooth, and the caption mentions RAM and CPU usage maxing out just to render the effect. That makes sense, since constantly rendering five active windows in 3D space, with transforms and depth calculations running in real time, is far heavier than a normal 2D compositor pushing flat rectangles around a screen.

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A 3D desktop like this looks striking in a short clip, but there isn't much practical use beyond that. Multitasking is probably the closest thing to a real use case, since you could technically keep five apps loaded on five faces of the cube. In practice, reading text or tracking an app at an angled, rotated position sounds more like quite a hassle, and that's before counting the hardware overhead needed just to keep the animation from stuttering.

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Question #1

What hardware specs did the laptop in the video appear to struggle with when running the 3D cube desktop?

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Question #2

Does the article say whether the cube desktop is a standalone OS or a custom compositor running on top of an existing OS?

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Question #3

Is there any confirmation in the article about who actually developed the 3D OS shown in the viral clip?

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Question #4

How does the demo handle input and window movement across the cube faces — does the article mention mouse, touch, or gesture controls?

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Concepts like this tend to work best as tech demos rather than daily drivers. It's fun to show off and probably even more fun to build, but turning it into something people would actually want for real work is a much harder problem than making a cube spin.