Instructions for speakers

These instructions aim to be a detailed guide to giving a successful talk at metauni. First you should follow the normal instructions to install and setup Roblox and spatial voice. Then you should check the hardware page for tablet and microphone recommendations. Some notes:

• If you are giving a slide talk, please prepare your slides at a 4:3 ratio and send them as a PDF to the seminar organiser at least a few days before your talk (they will have to upload PNGs of each slide into Roblox, which may take a while). We prefer 4:3 because we typically have two slides next to each other (to provide context to the viewer) and this works better at 4:3 than 16:9.
• Please prepare your slides with a black background rather than white, as this is easier to read in the context of the virtual world.
• Make text larger than you would for a Zoom presentation with only one slide at a time, and put less on each slide.
• Do not use animations (i.e. multiple takes on a single slide) as these cannot be translated in-world: we have one physical board per slide and do not move between slides on a single board.

Joining the event

The organiser should provide you with the URL of the Roblox world for your talk. If not, you should be able to find by looking for a “Join now” link on the schedule on the metauni homepage.

1. We recommend joining the event five minutes early, since Roblox may need to upgrade and you should check that spatial voice is working.
2. Make your way to the in-world location of your talk.
3. Locate the Orb and Attach as Speaker: stand close enough to the proximity prompts to appear then hold F for a few seconds or click/tap on the popup. You should hear a sound and see some new GUI elements at the top of your screen.
4. Please wait for the session organiser to confirm that the recording is working, and invite you to begin your talk.
5. Use the navigation controls (W, A, S, D on a keyboard, tap and drag near the bottom left of an iPad) to keep your player near the board you are writing on. This is how the Orb knows what board you are writing on.
6. When you want to move to a new board, simply move your player to the new board, stop running, and then wait a few moments for the orb (and the view of players using OrbCam) to join you at the new board. In the interim catch your breath - if you speak, audiences listening through the orb may be unable to hear you until it gets back within hearing range.

If you feel uncomfortable managing the Orb, please ask the session organiser if they can take care of it for you.

Presenting

If you are giving a board talk we recommend running Roblox on an iPad with Pencil (or equivalent tablet and stylus) with any of the following audio-visual setups:

1. Headphones with in-built microphone plugged into the 3.5mm jack.
2. Headphones with in-built microphone plugged into the Lightning plug.

We’ve had speakers successfully give talks with both setups, but perhaps among them (1) is optimal because it allows you to plug your iPad into a power outlet if the battery gets low during your talk. On that note:

• Lower graphics quality and brightness for battery life: We recommend setting Graphics Quality in Roblox to its minimum setting and turning down the screen brightness in the system menu of your device. At high settings Roblox will rapidly consume your device’s battery. To set the Graphics Quality open the Roblox Settings menu (via the Roblox icon in the top left hand corner of your screen), switch Graphics Mode to Manual and then reduce Graphics Quality until there is only one coloured bar. On the minimum Graphics Quality setting and around 1/3 brightness I get approximately 3.3 hours of battery life on a iPad Pro 12.9inch 2nd gen.

Moderation

Currently all images displayed in Roblox are moderated. That means that if you want to upload slides, you have to be aware of the moderation rules. Here are some of the rule violations you are likely to encounter in preparing academic content for Roblox:

• Make sure your in-game text and images do not contain URLs or email addresses (e.g. the first or last page of preprints). Their AI will catch anything that even remotely looks like either, so “a@b” or “a.b” is risky. However links to YouTube, Twitter, Twitch are explicitly allowed. Don’t try to be clever and replace bill@gmail.com by bill at gmail dot com.
• Do not put information about Discord in-world or instructions for using it
• Photos of people (they are afraid of users identifying other users)
• Make sure the text in your images is not too small for the filtration system to read (this may easily happen if you compress high resolution images, rendering small fonts close to unreadable).