Cursor Everywhere: An experiment on shared cursors for every website

1

Miro

Working with collaboration tools like Miro and VS Code Live Share has transformed my expectations of collaborative interactions. However, I found myself trying to move my cursor around websites during calls with colleagues, despite not sharing my screen. It was as if I believed they could see my cursor. I even caught myself saying, 'and when I click here...', only to realize I was sharing with nothing but the void.

#Digital Whiteboard #Team Collaboration #Visual Collaboration 231 social mentions

2

Ably

A realtime protocol like WebSockets seemed like a logical way to share real-time updates of cursor positions. Working at Ably, it was a no-brainer to use it as my WebSocket-based pub/sub broker. A pub/sub broker simplifies many aspects of projects like this, often coming with built-in features that speed up development. For instance, I wanted each browser's cursor position to be continually available to other clients on the page. To achieve this, I could use the Presence feature of Ably, which maintains a set of attributes associated with each client and its connection.

#Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS) #Realtime Backend / API #Mobile Push Messaging 20 social mentions