Abstract

Desktop conferencing systems are now moving away from strict view-sharing and towards relaxed “whatyou-see-is-what-I-see” (relaxed-WYSIWIS) interfaces, where distributed participants in a real time session can view different parts of a shared visual workspace. As with strict view-sharing, people using relaxed-WYSIWIS require a sense of workspace awareness—the up-to-the-minute knowledge about another person’s interactions with the shared workspace. The problem is deciding how to provide a user with an appropriate level of awareness of what other participants are doing when they are working in different areas of the workspace. In this paper, we summarize requirements for workspace awareness, identify problems with existing groupware solutions, and propose as a replacement fisheye views that show both global context and local detail within a single window. Within groupware, these displays provide peripheral awareness of other participants by showing their position and actions in the global context. As well, detailed awareness is provided by assigning multiple focal points to each participant, and by magnifying the area around everyone’s work to highlight all details of their interactions. Concepts are illustrated in two groupware prototypes: a fisheye graph browser, and a fisheye viewer for text documents.

Citations