Activitoy
What is Activitoy?
Activitoy tracks and visualises your mouse-movements and that of the members of your workgroup. Aimed at teams of people working on a project or in a department at different locations, activitoy tries to provide a sense of group awareness.
Why Activitoy?
The possibilities offered by the internet have given a boost to people working from their home office and/or on the road. While this may have many benefits, it leaves workers without a sense of actually working with their colleagues. Similarly, working in cubicles or seperate offices may improve efficiency but cuts workers off from their team.Direct communication with team members can be established over phone or video-conference, or even by 'hopping by' the neighbouring cubicle or going to get coffe (to see if someone's there to have a chat with). However, the absense of indirect, unintended communication (such as overhearing conversations, hearing the sound of keys being pressed) may leave teammembers feeling alone, seperated from the team.
How does Activitoy work?
Activitoy visualises activity of team-members by tracking mouse-positions and broadcasting them to the team. Each mousepointer leaves a (fading) trail on a thumbnail canvas on each member's desktop. While trails are anonymous, seeing more trails than just your own provides a sense of 'hey, I'm not alone here!'.Just visualising mouse-movement prevents direct communication, though it is possible to sort-of-write-words on screen by making writing-gestures (without even pressing your mousebutton). These words will shortly display on each team-member's canvas before they fade like any mousetrail.
To prevent large workgroups with much activity flooding the network with broadcasted mousetrails, activitoy scales back its broadcast-frequency when more users join the group.
What about privacy/security?
Each mousetrail is anonymous. That's your privacy. However, activitoy in no way claims to be secure. Normally virtually no information about what you're doing can be deduced from what your mousepointer does onscreen. Then again you may choose not to run activitoy if you use a peninterface with handwriting-recognition (though broadcast-resolution of mousemovements is probably too low to actually evesdrop on your writing), or if you use an onscreen keyboard on a fixed location.
