A Chair is furniture. Walk your Avatar-mode character into one and it sits down.
It lives in the palette's Navigate category, one of the six Collaborate categories, beside the Portal, Bring Focus and the Link card. Chairs, like the rest of Collaborate, are in the Facilitate mode palette.
Sitting down
- Switch to Avatar mode (the canvas-tool picker, or press W).
- Click the chair, or steer onto it with the arrow keys. Your character walks over and takes the seat, turning to face the way the chair faces.
While seated:
- Your character ignores clicks elsewhere on the canvas, so a stray click can't drag you out of your chair.
- To stand up, press any arrow key, double-click the canvas, or press the small Stand pill under your character (the easy way on a touch screen).
- You can still wave and play reactions. Sitting takes away walking, not personality.
Everyone sees who is sitting where
An occupied chair shows a ring in the sitter's colour with their name above it, on everyone's screen.
Seating is presence, not part of the document. That means:
- A chair is never left stuck by somebody who closed their laptop: leaving Avatar mode, switching tab or disconnecting frees the seat immediately.
- Nothing about who sat where is saved, logged, or undoable.
Two people can end up in the same chair. That is allowed on purpose: a rule that stopped it would need a lock, and a locked chair is one that eventually gets stuck.
Setting it up
- Right-click the chair and open Chair to point the seat one of four ways: Down, Left, Up or Right. A ring of chairs around a table can then face inward, and whoever sits down faces the same way.
- Give the chair a label to make it somebody's chair: a name, or a role like "Facilitator" or "Scribe". The label sits under the chair.
- Unlike most Collaborate elements, a chair has no … on its face; everything is in its right-click menu.
- Otherwise it behaves like any element: move, resize, rotate, theme, lock, copy and export.
Desks and sofas
Two more pieces of furniture work the same way, beside the Chair in Navigate:
- A Desk is a chair pulled up to a desk with a computer on it. Walk your character in and it sits down facing the screen, with its back to the room.
- A Sofa seats two side by side. Walk in from the left and you take the left cushion; from the right, the right one.
Both point any of the four ways from their right-click menu (Desk or Sofa), like a chair. Turning one onto its side shows it from the side, still standing on its legs, and makes it tall, so a sofa against a side wall is a sofa seen from the side, its two cushions one above the other.
Every chair, desk and sofa is drawn upright from the room's point of view, whichever way it faces: facing you, you see the seat; facing away, the back of it; facing left or right, its side. Nothing is ever drawn on its side or upside down.
What it's for
Eight chairs around a drawn table is a seating plan, an attendance display and a turn-taking device at once, built from elements you already know how to place. "Everyone grab a seat" becomes something the canvas can actually do.
Was this article helpful?