What's New with Metaverse Web Showcase
Feb 2 2023
On February 3, 2023, our engineers pushed a significant update to Croquet Metaverse Web Showcase. These changes benefited all installations of Web Showcase, including those made using the Web Showcase WordPress Plugin.
We would like to share with you what changed in our first major update since the launch of Web Showcase. The majority of these changes didn't require any updates to your website. We'll clearly mark below any changes that require a manual update.
Update Notes
Remodeled Room
If your Showcase contains 7 or fewer pieces of content, the environment model will automatically be swapped for a smaller room.
Additionally, we changed the default environment model for all Showcases. Now, you'll see a new reflective water feature and potted plants in a more intimate environment.
Privacy Controls
When a developer integrates Web Showcase into their website, that Showcase instance is
invite-only by default. This means that two people
who visit the same URL will be
dropped into a unique Showcase instance. Those visitors can invite other people
into the same Showcase instance if they use the Invite functionality within the
Showcase's UI. If those visitors share the URL in their address bar (i.e.
https://example.com/showcase, if example.com
were to integrate Showcase), they would not join
the same Showcase session.
With this update, we have made it easier for you to change Showcases to be public.
That means two people on example.com/showcase will
join the same Showcase session and be able to interact in 3D and with spatial audio.
Developers using our developer
portal to
generate Web
Showcase HTML can change the privacy property
within load({}) between "public" and
"invite".
Developers using the Web Showcase WordPress Plugin who manually update their plugin will see improvements to the Showcase Block sidebar privacy settings:
Timeout Adjustment
Previously, visitors of Web Showcase worlds would automatically disconnect from the world 10 seconds after backgrounding the browser tab. If those visitors were present in the spatial audio voice call, they would be disconnected at that time.
To resolve this problem, we adjusted the automatic disconnection timeout to 5 minutes, which enables visitors to continue their voice conversation while leaving the Web Showcase world in the background.
Reliability Improvements
We switched to a new CDN, for loading external scripts, which improved product reliability.
Default Avatar Changes
We improved the default set of sequentially-assigned avatars.
User Interface Improvements
We made several changes to the Showcase UI, including:
- Added a clearer hint to the movement joystick for first-time visitors.
- The on-screen movement joystick now supports both clicking to move and dragging to move.
- Double clicking on the environment model will no longer move your avatar unless you double click on a piece of content on the wall.
- We replaced the loading animation.
- When a visitor changes their name and the new name can't be displayed, the name input field now indicates an error
- We added a "Built with Croquet OS" label to the dropdown menu.
- We now refer to "Users" of Web Showcase as "Visitors".
Interested in trying out the Metaverse Web Showcase?
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