Techniques for improving the visibility and "sharability" of semi-transparent video in shared workspaces

Semi-transparency increases the amount of information that interfaces can expose in a given screen space by allowing content from a window to remain partially visible while other windows overlap it. We have previously explored the application of a full screen, semi-transparent video window in a collaborative, distributed software environment in an effort to more seamlessly incorporate face-to-face communication into group software development. Our experience with the system suggests that, while semi-transparent video can improve aspects of distributed collaborations, two problems emerge. First, the alpha blending of pixels from video overlays can obfuscate certain types of visual data, making either the video or the underlying content diffcult to see. Second, video overlays complicate the ability to provide application sharing at the framebuffer - the most general sharing layer. In this paper, we present methods to overcome these problems.