Presence

See who else is working on the show right now, what they are looking at, and where they are pointing.

Moonshine is a shared control surface. Everyone signed in to the same machine is working on the same project at the same time — there is no per-person copy to merge later. When one person opens a project, everyone's screen switches to it.

The avatars in the top bar

Everyone currently signed in appears as a small round avatar on the right of the top bar, between the help button and your username. Each avatar shows the first letter of that person's display name.

What you see	What it means
Avatar with a ring in its own color	You. This one is not clickable — you cannot follow yourself.
Plain avatar	A collaborator. Click it to follow their view.
Avatar with a white ring	The person you are currently following.
A Following name chip to the left of the avatars	You are following someone. Click the chip to stop.

Your own avatar is always first; the rest are ordered by when they joined.

Note

The avatar row needs room, so it is hidden on narrow windows — on a phone, or when a desktop window is squeezed below roughly 768 pixels wide. Everything else about presence still works; you just can't see the row or click to follow.

Per-user colors

Each account is assigned a color automatically, and it stays the same for that person on every screen and in every session. That one color is used consistently:

• their avatar in the top bar
• their pointer and name pill on 2D tabs
• their camera outline and name label in the Scene
• the dot where they are pointing at a surface
• the dots showing the points they have selected

Once you have learned "amber is the person on the tower", you can read the whole screen at a glance without checking names.

Colors are drawn from a fixed set of eight, so on a big crew two people can land on the same one. The markers that matter most — the pointer, the camera outline, the dot on the surface — all carry the name as well, so a shared color costs you a glance rather than leaving you guessing.

Remote pointers

On every tab except Scene, collaborators appear as a small arrow with a name pill in their color, tracking their pointer in real time.

Two things keep this readable:

• You only see people on the tab you are on. Someone working in Playback does not clutter your Mask canvas.
• Idle pointers disappear. If someone stops moving for about 8 seconds, their pointer is hidden — a still pointer would otherwise read as "they're here" long after they walked away. It reappears the moment they move.

Presence in the Scene

The Scene tab is 3D, so a flat pointer would be meaningless there. Collaborators are drawn in the scene itself instead:

• A camera outline. A wireframe pyramid with a faint translucent fill, in their color, sitting where their camera is and pointing at what they are looking at. Their name floats at the tip.
• A dot where they are pointing. When their pointer is over the surface, a dot with a name pill appears at that exact spot on the geometry — and it rides the surface, so it stays correct even as the surface is being warped.
• Their selection. The points they currently have selected appear as smaller, fainter dots in the same color.

The camera outline is hidden in exactly one case: while you are following them, or they are following you. A follow puts the two cameras in the same place, so drawing theirs would leave you sitting inside their pyramid looking at a colored wash. Their pointer dot and selection dots stay visible. Nothing else hides the outline — two people who happen to orbit to the same spot still see each other's.

Tip

If a collaborator's camera outline vanishes but their avatar is still in the top bar, they have either left the Scene tab or dropped into projector view (P) — a viewpoint everyone can already see. Nothing is wrong.

One person, one session

An account can only be signed in one place at a time. If you sign in on a second device or a second browser tab, the earlier one is signed out and shows:

Signed in from another tab. Please sign in again to continue here.

This is deliberate: it keeps one avatar, one color, and one set of editing claims per person, so "who has this" is never ambiguous. If two people need to work at once, they need two accounts.

Where to go next

Page	What it covers
Locks	How editing rights are claimed, shown, and handed over
Following an operator	Locking your Scene camera to someone else's
Editing a surface together	Two people shaping the same surface at once
Users and sessions	Creating accounts and revoking sessions (administrators only)

To get a second person onto the show in the first place, see Join from another device.