Improve behaviour when multiple people load into a single spawn point

[emclaren]

I've noticed it can be very stressful for new users if there is only one spawn point set in the room and several people enter at once. Everyone loads in the same place, and if people don't move right away it can cause visitors to feel like people are breathing in their ears, talking very loudly, and are missing from the space (they can hear each other, but not see each other).

This came up with one of the rooms at virtu-all hands and was mentioned as an issue to me by many people. I've also seen this happen at meetups.

It would be nice if a spawn point already had someone in it, that perhaps there would be some automatic jitter for the next people joining so they would load right beside the other user.

If I recall correctly, you can set a spawn point to be occupiable, however, when this is applied additional users will load at a different part of the scene (the origin, I believe), which is not the desired or expected behaviour.

┆Issue is synchronized with this Jira Task

[misslivirose]

I think that there are two challenges here that have different considerations -

1. If you walk into a user so that they're invisible, should they still be audible? I can see justification for both options - in the case where they are invisible but audible, you have the benefit of knowing that there is someone near you, which you would lose if the user was inaudible as well, but the existing design of having overlapping avatars be loud and speaking right in your ear when you can't see them isn't desirable either. I would also argue that being able to get up close to someone so that you're invisible but still audible could be a vector for possible harassment in more public rooms.

2. Adjusting landing points to be more like landing zones. I've seen this accomplished via the idea of spacers in different ways, but the challenge in this case becomes shifting from a spawn 'point' to a spawn 'zone', the former of which has an idea of a single person being able to occupy a space, and the latter provides a general area that can have multiple people within it. This might be fine (ultimately, it could make sense to have both be an option). Some of the tradeoffs are around precision of entering an environment (for example, it could be crowded in a small hallway entrance anyway, even with adjustments to landing points).