What is Avalon

Microsoft's next-gen display system explained

Published on March 6, 2005 By Draginol In Avalon

Avalon is the new rendering and compositing technolgoy that Microsoft is developing primarily for Longhorn (Microsoft's next release of Windows) that is available in beta form on Windows XP as I write this.

From Windows 3.0 all the way through Windows XP, the Windows graphical environment was pretty primitive. The Graphical Device Interface (GDI) provided only limited visual options to developers.

As 3D hardware has improved, the gulf between what developers could do with traditional Windows programs versus what one could see in a PC game grew more and more obvious.

Avalon is designed to bridge that gap. It provides two things of particular interest:

(1) It delivers a new rendering and compositing model that developers can take advantage of. This new model can make use of the latest/greatest advances in video hardware (such as 3D). That doesn't mean one must use it to create "3D" looking programs but rather it means that all kinds of impressive visual effects become possible.

(2) It provides a new programming model that allows software developers to create user interfaces that are defined declaratively (such as created via XAML).

(Editorial on)

Everything else you hear about Longhorn is mostly just fluff. It's really about Avalon. Without Avalon, there's not much point to Longhorn in my view.

The reason for that is not because people want eye candy but because we are currently moving towards a video stand-still.

Consider this, modern LCD displays can display at 1600x1200. But many people don't bother to run at the highest resolution their monitor can display because "everything gets too small". That's because fonts and other elements in Windows are at a static DPI (96 dpi to be precise).

Avalon's compositer allows you to use the full potential of your display. Increase your resolution as much as you can and then adjust the size of everything on the fly. Instead of bitmaps and hard coded font sizes, you have vector based interfaces that simply become more detailed, more defined as you increase the DPI. Same for fonts.

So the user running at say 3200 x 2400 in 2008 isn't greeted with tiny text and tiny UI. Their UI is whatever size that is comfortable for the user with it being sharp and detailed (Rather than scaled up with fuzzyness).

The compositing engine will allow for far for interesting ways to display information on the screen. Right now, developers are limited in how they can display things on screen by the graphics sub-system. When people saw the Dock on MacOS X with its "genie" effect, PC users oohed and awed. That sort of thing is just the tip of the iceberg. That's just eye candy.

With XAML, developers will be able to put together sophisticated, visually appealing programs quickly and easily that tap into Avalon. This could create user interfaces that are designed to meet the user's needs much more easily than what we have today.

(editorial mode off)

Comments (Page 1)

werewolf

on Mar 06, 2005

whoa...that sounds spookily cool

I cannot wait to see what Stardock can do with this stuff. It will be unimaginable.

Corky_O

on Mar 07, 2005

The future sounds bright.

Factory

on Mar 07, 2005

"Avalon's compositer allows you to use the full potential of your display. Increase your resolution as much as you can and then adjust the size of everything on the fly. Instead of bitmaps and hard coded font sizes, you have vector based interfaces that simply become more detailed, more defined as you increase the DPI. Same for fonts."
Windows since at least 98 could do this, the problem is, very few developers are willing to put in the work to actually make it happen, although microsoft, to their credit generally did a good job of scaling with DPI changes. Another problem is that to do a good scalable interface you (unfortionately) need to know the actual dpi of the device you are working with, or make chaging the DPI not hidden away in an obscure dialog that requires a reboot.
And one one would hope that Avalon makes it really hard to do pixel based layout, and really easy to do distance (ie, units in centimeters, inches, etc) based layout, otherwise you will just be back in the same position as before Avalon.

"With XAML, developers will be able to put together sophisticated, visually appealing programs quickly and easily that tap into Avalon."
Erm, eyecandy really.

"This could create user interfaces that are designed to meet the user's needs much more easily than what we have today."
A layout engine is not going to do a great deal towards making better user interfaces, the hard part is in the guts behind the interactions between different controls, IMHO.

Thomas Thomassen

on Mar 07, 2005

And Avalon will be availible on XP.

Everything else you hear about Longhorn is mostly just fluff. It's really about Avalon. Without Avalon, there's not much point to Longhorn in my view.

I disagree with that. All the pillars of Longhorn will be interesting. All though WinFS won't be in Longhorn when it ships, it'll be an pretty neat thing. But I also thing there will be many more reasons besides the basic pillars of Longhorn. Remember, Longhorn is comming out in 2006 (hopefully), that means it'll be 5 years newer than XP. That's a pretty long time in computerworld, so I expect some very interesting new features.

Desolator

on Mar 07, 2005

Avalon is the new rendering and compositing "technolgoy" - technology.

Myrrander

on Mar 07, 2005

Ah, I was hoping for some good old Arthurian myth.

RockinMike

on Mar 07, 2005

help me out here with this, if the "basic computer user" downloads and uses avalon the benefits are a greater looking screen to view?

rombios

on Mar 07, 2005

>Avalon is the new rendering and compositing technolgoy that Microsoft is developing primarily for Longhorn

WRONG!
Avalon is the resting place of King Arthur Pendragon. The isle inhabited by "Third Race" and the Realm of Oberon!

kona0197

on Mar 07, 2005

Anyone want to wager that by the time MS gets Longhorn out the door Linux will be a bit better and Macs will be a bit cheaper and there will be less MS users? (Thanks in part to MS shooting themselves in the foot with the new anti-piracy crap and all the ppl switching to firefox or just feed up with having to patch the XP system every other month...)

Lantec

on Mar 07, 2005

Brad, just curious if you know how that will effect programs that are already vector based such as CAD programs. Do you think they'll be able to use some of the built in features of Avalon or would this cause a massive change in the way they approach the interface?

mrbiotech

on Mar 07, 2005

Draginol, you don't mind if I input this in SkinWiki, do you? Great information, would love to add it. XAML too, again, with your permission.
http://www.skinyourscreen.com/skinwiki

Underdog45

on Mar 08, 2005

It was announced yesterday that WinFS is getting backported to XP too. Will all the stuff getting backported, it's almost like Longhorn will just end up being XP SP3.

By the way, there seems to be a lot of confusion out there over WinFS. It isn't really a new file system; Longhorn will still use NTFS. WinFS will attatch metadata to files in order to make hard drive search easier and faster. Essentially, it's like a beefed-up desktop search engine like Google, et. al. have already made integrated into the OS. Mac crowd, feel free to make comments about it being exactly like Spotlight for OS X 10.4 only released later and made crappier. We all know you want to

Thomas Thomassen

on Mar 08, 2005

Just a couple of quotes from http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/longhorn_preview_2004.asp

And let me dispel a major misconception: The inclusion of Avalon on Windows XP does not mean that XP is getting the Longhorn user interface. It's not. Avalon is a presentation layer that enables rich media experiences and powerful display technologies. But Windows XP will still look like Windows XP after Avalon is installed; all that means is that XP users will be able to take advantage of Avalon-based applications and services. To get the advanced Longhorn user interface, you will still need to upgrade to Longhorn.
[/qoute]
There is moe to Longhorn that just the three pillars which are now beeing backported. Remember that Longhorn will be a product 5 year newer than XP. For instance, none of them three pillars beeing backported will give XP support for new hardware.

One bit of bad news is that the oft-touted WinFS storage engine will not be included in Longhorn. However, there's been a bit of misconception about WinFS and which features it enables, and Sullivan was quick to clarify that. "Longhorn will still feature a very rich search experience," Sullivan said. "It's kind of a mistake to equate local search with WinFS. They are different platform elements. So local search will still happen, and we will still deliver a very compelling full text search in Longhorn, alongside new shell capabilities. This will provide some semblance of the 'Find My Stuff' experience. But it won't be the full relational store with deep integration and platform exposure via APIs. For end users, however, it will be the same. We will offer a very compelling user experience for local search inside of Longhorn."

WinFS is more than metasearch like Google desktop and such. It's different than that.

Thomas Thomassen

on Mar 08, 2005

Latest article at Paul Thurrott's site on Longhorn is http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/longhorn_preview_2005.asp

SacRat

on Mar 11, 2005

Sounds nice, but it looks, that Avalon would once again force people get the lastest hardware

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