Canonical Posts New Unity 8 Mir Compositor Demo Video

Written by Michael Larabel in Ubuntu on 20 March 2014 at 05:12 PM EDT. 16 Comments
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Canonical developer Daniel d'Andrada has posted a new video showing off Unity 8 as a Mir compositor.

For those interested in seeing the state of things for Unity 8 on Mir with the Nexus 10, a video of the latest code is now available on YouTube. The device being used for the system was a Google Nexus 10 tablet running the latest Ubuntu Touch image.

The video shows QML in use with its scene-graph rendering engine, live Mir surfaces, and other features. Here's the full description and then the video.
This video shows a practical application of using the Qt scenegraph rendering engine as a Mir compositor, allowing us to mix QML items with live Mir surfaces seamlessly in one scene.

In this case, we demo the unity8 shell, where live surfaces are incorporated into the QML scene and are animated and transformed by Qt scenegraph renderer.

This demo uses Mir to abstract away the underlying hardware specifics, set up the display and GL context for Qt to do the rendering. Mir delivers all input events to Qt's event handling system, and manages clients connections and surfaces.

Those Mir surfaces are represented in the QML scene as a MirSurface item which can be manipulated by QML like any other native item: positioning, transformations and animations all just work. Qt decides the destination for input events, does the right transformation and hands them back to Mir to deliver to the client.

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