WorkAdventure 1.27.0 – The road to WorkAdventure 2
We are thrilled to announce that WorkAdventure 1.27.0 is now available! This release marks a significant milestone on our journey towards WorkAdventure 2, bringing several key improvements and laying the groundwork for future enhancements.
This new release brings native meeting rooms, native podium / stage areas, raises the limit of people in a bubble, and brings various UX improvements to enhance your experience. Let’s dive into the details!
A unified experience
WorkAdventure now offers native meeting rooms (in addition to Jitsi rooms). Those meeting rooms keep the same experience you have when you speak in a bubble. The video streams of the participants appear at the top of the screen, and you can see who is speaking thanks to the highlighted border around the video stream.
We put an extensive effort into having the best audio and video quality possible in those meeting rooms.
This is a huge milestone for us, as this really is the experience we had dreamed of when we started WorkAdventure.
Podium / Audience areas
The new podium areas (and the matching audience areas) allow you to create stages where speakers can broadcast their video / audio / screen to an audience.
Use those for conferences, presentations, or any situation where one (or a few) people need to speak to a larger audience.
For small meetups, you will have to choose between using meeting rooms or podium / audience areas. For up to ~30 users, meeting rooms are probably a good alternative as they allow everyone to speak freely. When the number of users increases, interactions become chaotic, and podium / audience areas are a better fit (just like in real life!).
Unlimited bubble capacity and new organic bubbles!
Up to now, bubbles were limited to 4 people. This limit was imposed by the underlying technology we used (full mesh WebRTC). With this release, we have raised this limit to as many people as you practically would want in a bubble.
No need to move to a meeting room when you are jumping from 4 to 5 people in a bubble anymore! That means bigger and friendlier coffee breaks 😊
In addition to that, the bubbles now have an “organic” shape. Instead of being a perfect circle, the bubble now slightly bends when Wokas enter or exit the bubble. This gives a more natural feeling to the bubbles.
Virtual backgrounds everywhere!
You can now use virtual background anywhere in WorkAdventure (not only in Jitsi, but in bubbles and meeting rooms also!).
And as a bonus, those backgrounds can be animated! Are you in a red-pill mood? Use our Matrix-inspired animated background. In a more chill-vibe? Our animated “waves at the beach” background if for you.
Note: use animated background lightly as the extra video needs to be transmitted over the wire. If you are looking for energy efficiency, you can keep those off.
Zone highlights
When entering a zone, you can now dim the rest of the map to focus on the zone you just entered.
This new feature (we call it “Highlight zones”) is particularly useful for meeting rooms or podium / audience areas.
It allows visually seeing the limits of your meeting room or stage.
As usual, this is highly configurable from the map editor and totally optional. If your map already makes it clear where the zones are, you probably don’t need to use this feature. And if you want to change the tone of the highlight effect, the radius or the opacity, you can do that too!
Zoom improvements
We heard you. Our initial implementation of the zoom out was supposed to create some kind of clouds that prevented you from zooming out, but if you forced a bit, you could still zoom out and step automatically into the exploration mode.
It seemed like a good idea, it was not. We are reverting these changes for a much more predictable zoom-out experience.
In addition, you will find zoom in / out buttons in the bottom right corner, “à la Google Maps”. A button also allows you to jump in exploration mode automatically.
A technical milestone
Interested into the technical details of how we achieved this? Read below.
All those new features and improvements were made possible by a significant technical milestone: the support of a new SFU: Livekit.
Up until now, WorkAdventure had two ways to establish video streams: via bubbles or in Jitsi.
Inside bubbles, the video was propagated in a “full-mesh” fashion. Each user would send its video stream to all other users, in a peer-to-peer way. Most of the time, the video would be routed directly from one browser to another without even hitting our servers. This is optimal, because it guarantees the shortest route, so the less delay in the stream.
However, it doesn’t scale well. Up to 4 users in a bubble, it’s perfectly manageable. But if you speak to 100 users, you need to send 100 streams. And that’s something not possible for most of our internet connections.
So when you need to speak to more than 4 people, you need a dedicated platform that will relay video (those are called SFUs). Until now, we used Jitsi. Jitsi is a splendid piece of open-source work and I want here to thank the Jitsi developers for the time and dedication they put in making Jitsi available to anyone. Jitsi, however, is meant to be used with its own UI. Despite the fact Jitsi offers low-level APIs, those are not extremely simple to use, stable or well documented. So if you use Jitsi, you have to load the Jitsi UI (this is what we have been doing for the last 5 years).
Enters Livekit. Livekit is an open-source low-level SFU. It has no UI and can be deeply integrated into WorkAdventure.
By adding Livekit support, we are suddenly able to stream to more than 4 people in bubbles, or to create meeting rooms directly inside WorkAdventure.
We didn’t abandon the full-mesh architecture though. We have been tirelessly working on supporting both transmission techniques at the same time. When you enter a bubble, it will start in full-mesh setup, until you reach 4 users.
When a 5th user enters, WorkAdventure will seamlessly upgrade the video to Livekit (you might see a short 200ms glitch as this happens, but the sound should carry on without any interruption).
Is Jitsi gone?
No, Jitsi is still here. For now, you will need to remove the Jitsi room in your map and replace it with a new
meeting room to benefit from the new meeting rooms.
When we reach feature-parity (i.e. when we provide recording in the meeting rooms / podium), we will migrate users automatically to the new meeting room system. You will still be able roll back to Jitsi if you want so.
As time goes by, Jitsi will move to a third-party conferencing system (just like we support Google Meet of Microsoft Teams in the SAAS version).
What’s next
The road to WorkAdventure 2 is long ahead.
The next release will add support for recording meetings / conferences right inside WorkAdventure.
We will also add the ability to upload your own virtual backgrounds.
We might also focus on adding some conference related features (like raising hands).
Being able to split a conference between a podium and an audience gives us great opportunities for a smoother conference experience (users can walk on the stage to ask a question), but also challenges. How do you allow people on the stage easily? How do you moderate them quickly? In the next releases we will tackle these challenges. If you have any ideas or any features you would like incorporated into WorkAdventure, now is a great way to tell us so.
Don’t hesitate to give us feedback, via email ([email protected]), or by opening a Github issue.