FAQ - What's the difference between scenes & rooms?

[emclaren]

On our team we often use the analogy of a theatre. The room is like the theatre itself (it has a fixed address and provides the infrastructure for the event), and the scene is like a set which can be swapped out for different performances.

Rooms
A room has a unique URL that doesn't change. When you load a room by navigating to that URL, the browser downloads all the code needed to set up the web page.

If you link to another room from inside your room, you would be navigating to a band new webpage, and the browser has to render everything from scratch. This means that none of the previous settings would be retained by the browser, and so you would need to go through the "enter room" process when you navigate from one room to another.

Scenes
Scenes are created using Spoke, and can also be found in the Scene Database (select "Choose a scene" from the dropdown menu). Scenes are like decorations you use to give ambience to your room.

If you switch scenes your browser doesn't need to load a new page from scratch, it simply clears the existing scene information from the HTML canvas and it with the new scene them with the new ones. Because you haven't navigated to a new URL, you don't have to go through any of the "enter room" process. If you want to change to a new environment, switching scenes can be easier than moving folks to a whole other room because they don't have to go through all this additional hassle. However, only a room administrator can change the scene. Switching scenes can also look nicer because for visitors to the room experience it as a "fade in/fade out" effect.

Fun fact - this effect when you switch scenes is actually created by a black box that is painted around every avatar's head in the room when the scene changes.

Here are two screenshots of the same room (note the identical url), but with different scenes (green island vs foggy lake)

[emclaren]

See above