An Avatar Pad is the entrance to a board in Avatar mode. While a tab has one, everybody who starts walking appears standing on the pad, rather than wherever they happened to be looking, so a group arriving for a session all starts in the same place.
It lives in the palette's Navigate category, one of the six Collaborate categories, beside the Fence, the Chair and the Portal. Like the rest of Collaborate it is in the Facilitate mode palette, and search adds one in any mode.
Setting up an entrance
- Add an Avatar Pad and put it where people should arrive: by a welcome note, in the lobby of a Virtual Office, at the start of a tour.
- Add a Selection Mode button set to Avatar, so people have a way in. Avatar mode is not in the Selection Mode menu: the button on the board is the door.
- Press the button. Your character beams in on the pad, and the view moves to it if it was somewhere else on the board.
Arriving
- Every time someone goes into Avatar mode on the tab, they start on the pad, even if they were walking somewhere else a minute ago.
- They arrive in a beam of light in their own colour, with a few sparks rising out of it. Everybody on the tab sees it, so you can tell who has just walked in.
- If the board has several pads, you start on the one nearest the middle of your view, so a big board can have an entrance per area.
- Placing, moving or deleting a pad never moves anyone already walking about. It only changes where people arrive next time.
- With reduced motion turned on, there is no beam: your character simply appears on the pad.
A pad on a hidden layer does nothing, and a board without a pad works as before: a character starts just below the button you pressed.
Who can do what
- Editors place, move, resize and delete pads.
- Participants and Viewers cannot change a pad, but they start on it and see everyone arrive, the same as an Editor.
The look
The pad is drawn in the same chunky pixel style and colours as the characters themselves: a round platform with a ring of cyan light set into it that shimmers gently. It has no label and no … on its face. It lies on the floor, behind furniture, and characters walk over it freely. Otherwise it is an ordinary element: move, resize (it keeps its shape), rotate, lock, copy and export.
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