Here are some notes for developing the Hydro-JULES Gather.town space:
- Go to here for your personalised Gather dashboard.
- For Map Maker tutorials and other resources, see here. See here for Gather's FAQs and checklist.
- [A reminder because I keep forgetting:] Bulletin icons: you can't upload a pdf to them. Instead, upload it to my website and then add in the link.
- The link to Grand Central Station is in Alex Chen's post here. The Gather Office is here.
- The crash course and troubleshooting docs I found are from IK 2021, but I thought they were too detailled.
From the initial email I got from Gather 18th Jan 2021:
We currently have our pricing plans listed here - https://gather.town/pricing. The price you get billed depends on the time frame you'd like to use each day, and how many users you expect to show up at the same time in the space.
You can start setting up your room anytime prior to your event reservation. Our free mapmaker allows you to play around with most objects so you can creatively test out your space prior to your reservation. We have a custom map uploader where you can 1) copy our templates rooms and modify them or 2) upload any image you want to completely customize your own spaces. Please feel free to take a look at out quick start guidelines for custom maps in addition to our various map maker tutorials on YouTube.
To copy the specific rooms you see in the below template demo spaces, you can go into the mapmaker and 'copy a template' to modify each of the rooms with objects and to connect portals the way you'd like the set up for your event. You can experience a few of our template rooms before creating a space by clicking on the following links:Once you're ready, you can purchase and finalize your reservation through your Dashboard. You can enter the date, time, and maximum user capacity into the dashboard to get a dynamic quote based on your event's details.
We currently have our pricing plans listed here - https://gather.town/pricing. The price you get billed depends on the time frame you'd like to use each day, and how many users you expect to show up at the same time in the space.
You can start setting up your room anytime prior to your event reservation. Our free mapmaker allows you to play around with most objects so you can creatively test out your space prior to your reservation. We have a custom map uploader where you can 1) copy our templates rooms and modify them or 2) upload any image you want to completely customize your own spaces. Please feel free to take a look at out quick start guidelines for custom maps in addition to our various map maker tutorials on YouTube.
To copy the specific rooms you see in the below template demo spaces, you can go into the mapmaker and 'copy a template' to modify each of the rooms with objects and to connect portals the way you'd like the set up for your event. You can experience a few of our template rooms before creating a space by clicking on the following links:Once you're ready, you can purchase and finalize your reservation through your Dashboard. You can enter the date, time, and maximum user capacity into the dashboard to get a dynamic quote based on your event's details.
FAQs:
1. I can't rename a room once I've created it (right-click on the room and my only two options are to make it default room or to delete it).
They said: "Unfortunately, you cannot rename a space at this time. However, you can head directly to https://gather.town/private and click the custom tab. From there, your previous space will show up and you can clone the map and create a new space name. "
2. Using your templates, how do I delete background things like trees? Are these editable at all? For example, the trees on your conference-main-hall (I wanted to use the template but sinply remove the trees) or the umbrellas on your waterfront template.
They said: "A lot of our premade templates can be changed to your liking, but the ones that include designs not already in our background painter or object picker can not be changed. (e.g. some tree designs, beach designs, castle designs) You can still place object within the space, but you can not alter the background that is already there. "
3. If I set up a TV screen object with a video to play (from a URL) and change it so that the logo of my company appears instead of the TV screen, the logo comes out so large that it covers ~20 cells (which is I guess because my company's logo is a high quality image). How can I resize it? There doesn't seem to be any option for this.
They said "When you are looking to place an interactive object with an embedded video it would be easiest to create the object and embed the video, rather than replacing the tv with the desired logo. I will include a video from our Youtube channel that will walk you through the process of creating and resizing a custom object here. Please note that we have recently changed our object picker so the "upload new" button will be found at the bottom left of the new object picker. When selecting the custom object you will want to select "embedded video" to make it interactive. "
4. I put in a 'bulletin text' object (in the Productivity menu) and it gave me the option of displaying a website, so I put https://www.ceh.ac.uk/ (my employer's website) with the idea that this website could display to anyone who interacts with that object (see bulletin.png attached). However, when I enter the space, it tells me Firefox can't open this website because "another site has embedded it" (see cant_open.png attached). Could you pls explain this? If I click on the "Open Site in New Window" button, it does open up correctly, but I was hoping it would just happen automatically.
They said "To embed websites into our interactive objects the URL needs to be embeddable within an iframe. I will include a link that will go into further detail about what that means and how to determine what links may work.".
5. Posters: I had to fiddle a bit with this. If I create a poster hall and select one of the poster objects, I get the option to upload an (1) "Image" (the poster itself in image format) and (2) "Preview Image" (a 'thumbnail' of the poster that appears as you get close to it) and under Advanced options (3) "Object image" (what you see at the location in Gather) and (4) "Active image" (don't know what this one is).
For (1) put the pdf/ppt but convert it first to an image file using Ilovepdf. For (2) don't leave it blank (even though it looks like it shouldn't preview anything if you leave it blank, it'll actually use an unrelated file) and just upload the same as (1). Leave (4) blank. For (3) I found it has to be an image exactly 100 pixels wide (I used those one-word preview image files like "Turf2Surf (ROBINSON)").
The online spaces I've done are just collections of standard Gather template rooms: it has enough there to be useable, but there are much larger templates to choose from.
- Spaces like this can have up to 25 people on them for free with Gather. To have a larger meeting, you need to book in advance with Gather (a 'reservation', which is what I did for the HJ Teams meeting) and pay $2 to $3 per person to attend.
- Even though the spaces work, they can be made more professionally (at cost). One company recommended on Gather's website is VirtualChair https://www.virtualchair.net/ and another is Uncork-it https://uncork-it.com/virtual-events . There are others listed on https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQrz8JSQv83CfoOXWm4Ja03BITBlV9GDdTbcPQ1uZUXrkd-34FWxnD4vHdFgxAAoNZrmCQEtBV7XP8Q/pub .
My quick-start HJ Datalabs doc is here: doc1. Matt F's much more extensive step-by-step JupyterLab from 16-JUN-21 is doc2 . Here are the HJ School schedule and code of conduct.
Marcus & Trisha's article about Virtual Conferences is here. My ppt about Gather is here, and the list of World Cafe groups here.
My Intro to Gather.town slides. My JFScratch slides. My Quick-start Gather.town page. The Groups doc. Fake paper.
Example one .
Marcus & Trisha's article about Virtual Conferences is here. My ppt about Gather is here, and the list of World Cafe groups here.
My Intro to Gather.town slides. My JFScratch slides. My Quick-start Gather.town page. The Groups doc. Fake paper.
Example one .