Group Awareness The Radar Overview provides group awareness to users within a simple collaborative drawing program. It shows where others are working, what they are working on, and allows for physical gestures with a simple telepointer. The focus of the project was on providing an awareness of the presence of others in a shared workspace. A scaled version of the entire workspace is shown in the radar overview along with the location of each user's current workspace view and the work they are doing. Small pictures communicate which user belongs to which workspace view and a colour border provides the corresponding colour of a user's telepointer.

Drawing Canvas Each user works on a simple drawing canvas and mouse movements and lines drawn are sent to all users' overviews. As a user moves about in their personal workspace by using the scroll bars, others are notified of this activity within their overview. The drawing canvas is not the intended focus for the project, but demonstrates the use of the overview and contains features such as colour, a picture filename, and a privacy meter to send user specific information to each overview. Tight and Loose Coupling Although allowing others in a collaborative setting to view your work and maintaining an awareness of your presence is important, the need for privacy also arises. Many users want to move from tight to loose coupling and vice versa frequently. The drawing canvas provides a privacy meter to allow a user to keep their current work private or allow it to be public. In response to the privacy meter, the radar overview also shows each user's desire to maintain privacy. As a user requires more privacy their workspace will become more opaque: first with diagonal lines, then with crossed lines, and finally with a completely opaque workspace in the overview. The ease of viewing another person's work becomes more difficult as the need for privacy increases and a social protocol develops. The social protocol by collaborators requires them to realize when an area is private and to do their work elsewhere.