World and session thumbnails

Within Resonite, worlds and sessions have thumbnails which give a glimpse of the world or session without needing to join it. These thumbnails will always be 360 degree images, allowing one to project the image onto a sphere and pan around. These thumbnails are usually captures of the world or session at various points, which can be either world-defined or automatically positioned based on users in the session.

Thumbnail types

Session

Session thumbnails are used when the world is viewed in the context of an active session. This includes:

• On the main page of the world browser when there is an active session of the world
• In a session orb
• In the Resonite Discord within the #active-sessions channel. These images will look warped and distorted as the 360 degree image is projected on a flat surface.

In an active session, the process for capturing a session thumbnail is as follows:

1. Every few minutes, each user in a session takes a 360 photo at a session capture point and stores it locally.
2. The session host's computer negotiates with the users in a session to randomly choose one of the taken photos.
3. The session host's computer uploads the chosen thumbnail to the cloud and thus updates the thumbnail of the world.

If any active slot in the world has a SessionCaptureThumbnailSource component on it, session captures will be taken from the position of said slot. If multiple slots have this component on them, one of them will be chosen at random, weighted such that points with more users nearby are more likely to be captured from.

World

World thumbnails are used when the world is viewed without the context of an active session. This includes:

• On the main page of the world browser when there is not an active session of the world
• In the world browser when on the <new session> tab of a world
• In a world orb

World thumbnails are automatically captured when the world gets saved. By default, this capture is taken from the host user's head slot and excludes all users from the capture. This thumbnail can be customized in two ways:

1. A custom world capture point can be defined with the WorldCaptureThumbnailSource component. This component allows the option to include or exclude users from the capture.
2. A completely custom world thumbnail can be defined with the WorldTextureThumbnailSource component. Note that only 360 degree images will be rendered properly with this component.

If multiple slots have either of these two components on it, a slot will be uniformly picked at random to capture from.

Overlays

Both the SessionCaptureThumbnailSource and WorldCaptureThumbnailSource components allow an Overlay image to be imposed on the capture. For session captures, this overlay must have an average alpha channel value of 25% or less or else it will not be applied. World captures do not have this limit.