Campus Manual: Proximity Video Chat & Calls

Manual index·← Your Avatar, Identity & Presence·AI Agents & Characters (NPCs) →

Multiverse Campus doesn't have a "start meeting" button — video calls start themselves when you walk up to someone. This chapter covers how proximity calls turn on and off, the floating video panel and its controls, device settings, screen sharing, group calls, invitations, peer-to-peer connections, same-room (co-located) audio handling, live captions, call recording, and the moderation tools faculty have inside a call.

How proximity calls start

Walk your avatar close to another student (or a small group of students) in the open world, a dorm room, or a building, and a video call starts automatically for everyone in range — no dialing, no accept screen. The call ends automatically when you walk away from everyone in it.

A few things govern this:

• Proximity radius. The server checks your position on every movement update. Getting close enough triggers the call; once you're in a call, the radius to end it is a little larger than the radius that started it, so you don't flicker in and out of a call while standing near the edge.
• Cooldown. A call won't be torn down within the first few seconds of starting, even if you immediately step away, to prevent rapid start/stop cycling.
• Merging into an existing call. If you approach people who are already in a call together, you join their call instead of starting a new one — unless that call has been made Private (see below), in which case you're kept out.
• Buildings auto-lock. If you start a call while inside a building, that call is automatically set to Private so people outside the building (or on a different floor) can't wander in.
• Blocking. You never get pulled into a proximity call with someone you've blocked, or who has blocked you.

Opting out of proximity calls

You don't have to be interruptible. Two controls affect whether proximity calls happen at all:

If you're in an existing call and switch on DND or Extreme Introvert, that call ends for you immediately.

Dorm room and common area calls

Dorm rooms and dorm common areas use their own always-on call rooms rather than pure proximity geometry: everyone in the same dorm room (or the same dorm's common area) shares one call room just by being there, so you don't need to stand shoulder-to-shoulder to be in the same call.

The video panel

Where: appears automatically as a floating panel once you're in a call.

The call panel floats above the game view rather than taking over the screen, so you can keep playing/walking while on a call.

Moving and resizing the panel

Drag the panel by its top bar to reposition it. Drag a corner to resize it. Drop it near a screen edge and it snaps into one of several fixed layouts:

You can also click the layout buttons directly instead of dragging. Strip and Bar layouts are automatically disabled (greyed out) while someone is sharing their screen, since a shared screen needs more room — the panel jumps to Stage layout instead.

View controls

These live in the panel's drag bar:

Inside the video grid itself:

• Click the ⤢ enlarge icon on any tile to pin it full-size (spotlight mode) with everyone else in a filmstrip below. Click the same icon (now a ✕) to return to the grid.
• With many participants, the grid paginates — use the ‹ › arrows at the bottom to page through tiles once they'd otherwise shrink too small to be useful.

Call toolbar (mic, camera, screen share, more)

The bottom control bar (visible in every panel layout) has:

Everyone joins a proximity or dorm call muted by default; unmute yourself from the toolbar whenever you're ready to talk. If a brief network hiccup reconnects you, your last mute/unmute state is restored rather than being reset to muted.

If you start talking while your mic is muted, a "You're muted" banner appears briefly to remind you to unmute.

Privacy toggle

Click the lock icon to flip a call between:

• Public — nearby players outside the call can still see your speech bubbles, and (subject to the rules above) new arrivals can be pulled into the call.
• Private — speech bubbles are hidden from outsiders and no new participants can join by walking up. Calls you start inside a building are made Private automatically.

Call settings (devices)

Where: gear icon in the call toolbar.

The Call Settings panel lets you:

• Turn your camera on/off and pick which camera device to use.
• Turn your microphone on/off and pick which microphone device to use.
• Pick which speaker (audio output) device your call audio plays through.

Changes apply immediately and only affect the current call.

Screen sharing

Click the screen-share icon in the toolbar to start sharing; click Stop Sharing (shown over the shared screen) to stop. What the rest of the call sees depends on how many people are sharing at once:

• One person sharing: their screen becomes the large focus of the panel ("presentation mode"), with everyone's camera tiles in a thumbnail rail beside it. Click a thumbnail's enlarge icon to swap which camera is shown large next to the screen.
• Multiple people sharing at once: screens tile in a grid, each with a small picture-in-picture of that person's camera in the corner.
• Click any tile to feature it — it becomes the large primary screen with the rest in a filmstrip below (useful for spotlighting one presenter without kicking the others off screen).
• Faculty only: a Take Over button lets you feature your own screen share over anyone else's; a Pop Out All button opens every active screen share in a separate pop-up window; and if the room has table groups configured, a Pop Out Table picker opens just one table's screen shares in their own window (handy for walking between tables during group work).

Group calls vs. one-on-one calls

Proximity calls scale naturally from a one-on-one conversation up to a full room — there's no separate "start a group call" step. The video grid, screen-share layouts, and toolbar all work the same regardless of size; the panel just adds more tiles (and paginates once there are too many to fit).

Note: the in-game item that opens something called a "group chat" from your inventory is a flavor/joke item (a parody bulletin-board-style text feed with a running gag about deleted messages) — it is unrelated to proximity video calls and is not a real messaging feature.

Call invitations

Where: Online list in the left chat sidebar.

If you want to pull someone into your current call who isn't standing nearby, click Invite next to their name in the Online list (only available while you're already in a call). They get a pop-up notification naming you and a 60-second window to respond:

1. Join — they're added to your call immediately.
2. Decline — you're notified they declined; nothing else happens.
3. No response within 60 seconds — the invitation is automatically dismissed for them.

You can't invite someone who's already in your call, and invitations only work if the person is online.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) calls

Calls with 3 or fewer participants can run over a direct, encrypted peer-to-peer connection instead of routing audio/video through the server. New small calls default to server mode; use the P2P / Server toggle in the toolbar to switch. If a call grows past 3 participants, it is automatically switched to server mode for everyone (P2P doesn't scale past that).

If a P2P connection can't establish (common on networks that block direct peer connections), a banner tells you the connection timed out and suggests switching to server mode via the toggle.

Same-room audio (co-located devices)

If two or more people are physically in the same room and both have their devices' microphones and speakers live, you'd normally get an echo/feedback loop between their two devices. Campus detects this: devices that acoustically pick up each other's audio strongly (and mutually) are automatically treated as "co-located," and only one device in the group is kept as the active speaker output at a time — the others' local output is muted so you don't get feedback, while everyone's microphone still contributes normally. This is fully automatic; there's no button to declare co-location.

Live captions / real-time transcription

Where: CC button in the call toolbar.

While you're in a call, Campus automatically transcribes speech in the background (used both for the caption overlay and for speech bubbles other nearby players see above your avatar). The CC button only toggles whether you see the on-screen caption overlay — transcription itself is always running whenever your mic is live.

• Captions show the last few lines of speech with the speaker's name.
• The CC button is disabled (greyed out) whenever your microphone is muted, since there's nothing to transcribe.
• If the captions service isn't configured on the server, the CC button doesn't appear at all.
• Faculty can disable live transcription for the whole room via the Faculty controls panel (see below) — when room transcription is disabled, everyone's caption overlay is suppressed regardless of their personal CC toggle.

Lecture-style broadcasts (a separate feature from proximity calls) have their own captions overlay that shows recent transcript lines plus the currently-in-progress line.

Recording a call

Requires: faculty or admin role to start a recording. Anyone in the call can view/stop it once running (per the button's state) and everyone who participated gets access to the result.

Click Record Call in the call toolbar to start recording. While active, the button shows Stop Recording with a pulsing red dot. Recording:

• Captures the call as a video file (server-side, not just a local recording).
• Builds a speaker-attributed (diarized) transcript alongside the video, using the same live transcription pipeline as captions.
• If everyone leaves the call, recording doesn't stop immediately — it pauses for a 5-minute grace period in case someone reconnects, then finalizes automatically.
• Once finalized, Byte (the campus AI assistant) generates a written summary and action items from the transcript, and sends the recording link, transcript, summary, and action items to every participant as a direct message.

Viewing past recordings

Where: hotbar/menu → Recordings (🎤 icon).

The Recordings panel lists your past calls in a Calendar view (click a day to see that day's calls) or a List view (grouped by date, most recent first). Selecting a recording shows:

• The video player (recordings made before video capture was added only show transcript/summary, with a note explaining why there's no video).
• Summary tab — the AI-generated meeting summary.
• Transcript tab — the full speaker-labeled transcript with timestamps.
• Action Items tab — shown only if any were extracted.

Playback links expire after a while for security; the player automatically refreshes the link and resumes from where you left off if that happens.

In-call moderation controls

Two levels of moderation exist: admins can mute individual users from anywhere in the app, and faculty get a dedicated in-call presenter panel plus per-participant actions.

Muting a specific participant

Requires: admin role.

Wherever a participant's camera tile is shown, admins see a small mute/unmute icon overlaid on that tile (and a similar pair of Mute/Unmute buttons appears anywhere else a participant is listed, e.g. participant lists outside the call view). Clicking it force-mutes that person's microphone at the server level — even a client that ignores the request can't keep publishing audio. The muted user sees a banner explaining they were muted by a moderator (and, if a chat mute was applied too, their proximity chat input is disabled with a "Muted by moderator" placeholder). Mutes can carry an expiry, after which the restriction is lifted automatically.

Faculty presenter controls

Requires: faculty role. Where: the shield icon in the call toolbar (only faculty see it).

Opens a small popover with room-wide actions:

These toggles are synced across faculty — if one instructor flips a setting, other faculty in the room see the popover update to match.

What students see during a hard lockdown: a banner pill appears in the call controls while lockdown is active, and the mic button's unmute action is greyed out (muting yourself still works — only unmuting is blocked). If you try to unmute anyway, a toast explains you've been locked down by faculty rather than silently failing.

Per-participant faculty actions

Requires: faculty role. Where: the ⋯ overflow menu shown on each non-faculty participant's tile (only visible to faculty, and only when the call-controls feature is enabled).

Timeout and Ban both show a confirmation dialog before taking effect, since they're account-level, not just call-level, actions.

Controls summary

Related chapters

• Getting Started

Manual index·← Your Avatar, Identity & Presence·AI Agents & Characters (NPCs) →