Uniquely coloured rectangles on the background show the view extents of the local and remote participants, providing location and identity awareness. For example, the foreground viewport in Figure 1 is represented as the mid-right rectangle in the background. When someone moves their foreground view via their scrollbars, their rectangle slides around the background, showing others where they are currently located. The Head-Up Lens. However, the user now has a magnification lens layered over a sub-area of the workspace, shown in Figure 2 as the offset, bordered, and projected area on the bottom right.
Users can edit either the local detail of the global context by shifting modes.
As groupware, all users see the same representation of the global context. Participants maintain activity awareness by seeing the immediate updates of other's editing actions on the global context. Each person stays aware of the location of the others by seeing the position of their magnifiers as coloured boxes on the background. Telepointers are also supported for gesturing and location awareness. Finally, people can align their magnified views when sharing of detailed information is required.