¶ Gather Town Spaces and Rooms
Gather Town is a company which provides a localized video chat service.
Gather Town provides an experience where inside a large room smaller groups of people can interact with both video and audio. The best way to think about this is to consider a large conference hall with a bunch of small booths (or posters). People can walk around in the large hall and interact with a small group of people that are near them. While Gather Town has some capability for a single person to broadcast to an entire room at once we've found that a Zoom Webinar format is generally better for that kind of meeting. Gather Town is good for when you expect nine or preferably fewer people to be in a small group interacting.
Gather Town spaces are a set of Gather Town rooms. Within a single space you can freely walk around into the various rooms within the space. Note that for conferences we've found that conference attendees can easily become lost if there are many similar rooms (e.g. in a poster session with multiple similar looking rooms). This happens because Gather Town places attendees at their last location when reentering a space. For this reason we try to use a single room per space policy so that at least an attendee always ends up in the room they were expecting to be in. Because of this often the words Gather Town Space and Gather Town Room are used interchangeably and, unfortunately, incorrectly.
Since we usually limit spaces to a single room, but still want to have multiple room experiences for attendees we can make use of the "hyper-linked spaces" of Gather Town where someone visiting a one space can be transported to another space. The main drawback here is that it does require that the user go through Gather Town's process loading a new space. However this is a better alternative than having users lost and not knowing where to go to find what they're looking for.
¶ Gather Town Designs for Conferences
There are a few different ways that Gather Town space design have been used for conferences. These fall into two categories: lounges and poster sessions. The next few sections talk about these designs in order of increasing complexity of design.
¶ Single Room Lounges
This is a single room where small groups of people can congregate and interact. This is good for social events or workshop break rooms. Single room lounges can either be created using a default large lounge template or creating a custom gathertown room.
¶ Single Room Poster Sessions
This is a single room that holds a poster session. A poster session room includes a set of posters and are designed to interact with authors presenting the poster during a scheduled poster session. Poster rooms hold a fixed number of posters. Poster rooms can be created using a template or custom rooms. While the overall steps for creating a poster room from a template may seem like a lot we still recommend using a template since all the same steps must still be done for a custom room and there is no automation to help you. If you have more posters than will fit into a single room then you can either hold multiple poster sessions at different times; use one of the more complex layouts below; or simply have multiple links to the different rooms in your conference schedule.
¶ Other Custom Spaces
While the above sections specifically talk to lounges and poster sessions a custom space can be created to serve any purpose desired. See creating a custom space.
We do recommend against having too many rooms in a single Gather Town space as described above, however when creating a custom space you can define as many rooms as you would like.
¶ Multiple Space Poster Sessions with Hyper-Room Templates
A single poster session, scheduled at one time, can have multiple spaces which are linked together using Gather Town's hyper linked spaces feature described above. There are templates defined in the automated templates which are called hyper-rooms. These spaces can become "parents" of multiple poster space "children". When this is done then an attendee can leave a poster room via hyper-link to the parent space and then from the parent space hyper link back into any other child poster space. Main conference poster sessions usually have this format since all the posters in a main conference poster session will not fit into a single poster space. To add children to a parent room select the parent's room from Gather Town Admin page and then in the parent room change page add children in the Children Rooms section near the bottom of the change page. Note that only "hyper-room" templates allow children to be added to a room, other templates don't support adding children.
Here is an example of a Poster Session with four different poster spaces (each with 28 posters) and a Hyper-Room space which links them together. Each space has one room. Conference attendees can move from one room to another using Hyper-Links. There are also templates for creating poster spaces with 40 posters.
Workshop Organizers: In addition to linking the rooms together using a hyper-room you can also add point at each individual room's URL by putting all the URLs into your abstract for the poster session.
¶ Multiple Room Poster Sessions with Custom Hyper-Rooms
It is possible to link template generated rooms together with custom rooms. This continues with the concept of a "parent" room and "child" room where the child room always exits to a parent room but the parent room may hold several different children rooms. To implement this feature contact coordinate with the conference IT team.
Workshop Organizers: In addition to linking the rooms together using a hyper-room you can also add point at each individual room's URL by putting all the URLs into your abstract for the poster session.
¶ Gather Town Single Sign On (SSO)
For the conference Gather Town and Eventhosts have implemented a single sign on capability using OAuth 2. GatherTown rooms are accessed using the eventhosts.gather.town domain and the SSO mechanism ensures that visitors to the space have been registered for the conference. Only registered conference users will be able to access the GatherTown spaces once they are in the SSO domain. The first time a visitor goes to https://eventhosts.gather.town they are redirected to https://gathertown.eventhosts.cc which checks that the user is registered for the conference. The OAuth 2 procedure then prompts the user to give permission for eventhosts.gather.town to access your user information (this is limited to email, firstname and lastname). Once this permission is given then you can access the Gather Town space.
Note: Gather Town spaces are originally created outside of the OAuth 2 mechanism and begin by being associated with the regular gather.town domain. The rooms are manually added to the new domain eventhosts.gather.town space by Gather Town in the days prior to the conference. This means that the URL for the Gather Town space changes in the days before the conference.
This means that effectively you may have two different user ids at Gather.Town. One is associated with eventhosts.gather.town and you authenticate this using OAuth 2 and your conference userid, and the other you authenticate using the send magic link via email. If you have a custom gathertown space and need to both edit and visit your space see the SSO section in Custom Gather Town spaces.
¶ Example Gather Town URLs
The following two URLs both refer to the same room. The first is once the space has been added to SSO, the second is the URL before being added to SSO.
https://eventhosts.gather.town/app/Xm2oQU3ngTYUd6gxt/example-poster-room. This url is an example of a Gather Town space, called large-poster-room, that is only accessible using Single Sign On mechanism.https://gather.town/app/Xm2oQU3ngTYUd6gxt/example-poster-room. This is the same space and is the address that must be used to edit the space using MapMaker. Also before a space is added to the Single Sign On this is the URL which must be used to access the space (for testing prior to the conference).