Calla

A wrapper library for Jitsi Meet that adds audio spatialization, to be able to create virtual meeting rooms.

PROBLEM

Even when it works, teleconferencing still kind of sucks. Only one person can realistically talk at any one time. This is fine for people giving presentations, but in real meetings, people speak over and around each other, or pair off into smaller subgroups, still being able to overhear the larger group.

SOLUTION

Calla adds a small, RPG-style map to the Jitsi meeting view. It gives you an avatar to walk around the room. Users choose where to sit in relation to other users. Users very close to you are set to full volume. Users a little far away have their volume scaled down accordingly. Users too far away to care about are rendered with zero volume.

• Visit the current installation at www.calla.chat.
• Enter a room name and user name. Suggest "Calla" for the roomname to meet other people linking from this repo (maybe).
  • Be careful in picking your room name, if you don't want randos to join. Traffic is low right now, but you never know.
  • Try to pick a unique user name. A lot of people use "Test" and then there are a bunch of people with the same name running around.
• Click "Connect" and wait for the connection to go through.
• Movement:
  • Click on the map to move your avatar to wherever you want. Movement is instantaneous, with a smooth animation over the transition. Your avatar will stop at walls.
  • Or, use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move.
  • Click on yourself or Hit the E key to spam emoji into the space as emote reactions.
  • You can roll your mouse wheel or pinch your touchscreen to zoom in and out of the map view. This is useful for groups of people standing close to each other to see the detail in ther Avatar.
• Options:

  • You can change your Microphone and Speaker device in the Options view. Click the Gear icon () in the toolbar.

    

INSTALLATION

NOTE: This project is currently going through an overhaul in how it is setup. In the future, Calla will be just the library for interfacing with Jitsi Meet and spatializing its audio. The application currently visible on calla.chat will become a separate project.

• First, setup Jitsi Meet on a server of your choice: Jitsi quick-start instructions.
• Install the Calla front-end (basically the rest of this repository) onto another server of your choice.
  • Modify "JITSI_HOST" in index.html scripts to point to your Jitsi Meet server.
• You may also want to edit index.html to change/remove the link(s) to this repository and/or my Twitter profile.
• new setup instructions TBD

Make sure you keep the distinction between your Jitsi installation and your Calla installation clear. You can conceivably run them on the same server, but I won't be digging into customizing a Jitsi installation enough to figure that out, so my setup has them on separate servers.

Docker-compose installation