Just when you thought that Vista, OS X Leopard and Compiz Fusion on (insert Linux distro here) had all but stolen the spotlight. May I introduce, BumpTop.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/M0ODskdEPnQ" width="350" height="288" wmode="transparent" /]

While I am completely lost as to where the benefit is here, I must confess that on any platform, 3D desktops simply are not my bag. Now this is not to say that BumpTop is not visually impressive, it just seems a bit like vaperware at this point as the above YouTube video was posted roughly a year ago.

Never fear though, there are plenty of 3D desktop options that provide a similar level of “funcionality” as you might have seen from BumpTop.

Real Desktop is one such example, be it a bit more limited than what I was seeing with BumpTop. With RealDesktop, all I found compelling was being able to toss my desktop items around without any real gaming like physical feedback.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/RplpDPT7Iu0" width="350" height="288" wmode="transparent" /]

And last but not least, what I might consider to be the most usable of all of these options – Spectasia.

Not nearly as exciting as the above desktop options, but at least I feel like there is a specific mission involved with its distribution for the end user – ease of use.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/8qlhP_Ovp8A" width="350" height="288" wmode="transparent" /]

So what do you think? Are any of these crazy desktop solutions going to be worth a hill of beans in the grand scheme of things? Or instead, are we look at yet another Clippy kind of feature, be it not specific to anyone company?