Bump your desktop with 3d icons!

Recently in the TED conference, I came across a peculiar innovation. Bumptop, as the creator Anand Agarwala calls it, is a desktop which closely resembles the conventional physical desktops we have at home. It has icons which behave more like tangible objects on our desktop, which can be stretched tossed, pinned on the wall, stacked, arranged, shuffled, and even crumbled and thrown over the corner. The idea looks interesting, but I am not sure, if it will find its way into practical computing.
The young Anand starts by calling Windows desktop as flat and rigid, and though he says, you can sex it up, with more lickable Mac, he calls Mac the same old crap we had for last 30 years. The arrogance soon fades out with his demo of Bumptop. It basically looks like a physical desktop and each icons have physical attributes of real world objects. It basically uses pie menus and lasso selections to quickly select icons from the desktop and apply transformations on it. The physics looks really good, with heavier (bigger) icons actually looking heavier when pushed and tossed, etc.
But, the question is why would you want such a messy, 3D desktop, when you have the flat and rigid, by usable, and tidy desktop. It may be the fact that you feel more at home, and relaxed working with a real physical desktop. Or the subtelity and the clarity that it provides may be another reason. Anand maybe able to give more reasons. Anyway I havent yet got the copy of the software which is in private beta, so I cannot comment on its system resource comsuption and speed. I will post updates when I get one.
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