You can create custom Gather Town spaces using a free account and the Gather Town Mapmaker. Custom spaces can be anything that can be done with GatherTown, a lounge, a poster session, a cafe, a park, or any combination of these. Custom spaces are an alternative to creating rooms using predefined templates (see creating a gather town poster session or creating a gather town room). While custom spaces provide significantly more flexibility they also are significantly more effort to create.
Create your space using Chrome, Edge, or Firefox at gather.town/create. We recommend that you only create one, or a very few, rooms per space because when attendees reenter the space they will be placed at their last location. With more than one room attendees can easily get lost. Once the room has been created go to the room and copy the path part of the url for the room for use in identifying the room in the conference database. After you have the path part of the url go to the Add gather town room (neurips.cc, icml.cc, iclr.cc, mlsys.cc, aistats.org,) page.
- Add a Name for the room. The name of the Gather Town Room must be unique for the conference so good practice is to prefix the name with either your workshop initials or some other unique identifying string.
- Paste the path url for the room you created in the Path url field.
- Important: leave the Template name field empty and the Auto Upload box unchecked., otherwise your mapmaker space will be overwritten by this template.
- Leave the other fields blank and Click SAVE
- In order to increase the capacity of the rooms to the proper scale for the conference please contact the Event Hosts team from either the contacts page or in the conference Slack channel for instructions on changing the owners and/or adding capacity.
- Note: Another issue when creating custom Gather Town rooms is editing the room after it is put into the single sign on domain. Read about this in Gather Town Space.
ΒΆ Editing and Managing Custom Spaces in the SSO
Once the conference approaches all GatherTown spaces are put into the Single Sign On domain (see SSO). Once this is done you will need to use different URLs to edit, manage, and access the space. As an example say the last two elements in the path for your space are T1hXtGAgbPyMUIVg/wkshop1-example then the different URLs for the space would be:
- To edit the space:
https://gather.town/mapmaker/T1hXtGAgbPyMUIVg/wkshop1-example - To manage the space:
https://gather.town/dashboard/T1hXtGAgbPyMUIVg/wkshop1-example - To enter the space:
https://eventhosts.gather.town/dashboard/T1hXtGAgbPyMUIVg/wkshop1-example
NOTE: Different credentials need to be used depending on the domain. For https://gather.town/ you will continue to use the credentials you used to create the space, usually this credential is either made using an emailed magic link or via a Google OAuth2 access. For the https://eventhosts.gather.town/ you will access this with authentication provided by the conference website (the whole idea behind the SSO is that only conference attendees can visit the site).
This can be an awkward circumstance when both editing and visiting a space to view the edits. One solution that has been found to work fairly well is to open two different browsers and have one set of credentials in one browser and another set of credentials in the other browser.