disambiguation

We present content-aware free-space transparency, an approach to viewing and manipulating the otherwise hidden content of obscured windows through unimportant regions of overlapping windows. Traditional approaches to interacting with otherwise obscured content in a window system render an entire window uniformly transparent. In contrast, content-aware free-space transparency uses opaque-to-transparent gradients and image-processing filters to minimize the interference from overlapping material, based on properties of that material. By increasing the amount of simultaneously visible content and allowing basic interaction with otherwise obscured content, without modifying window geometry, we believe that free-space transparency has the potential to improve user productivity.