Hi there! We meet again with a new article! How’s your virtual space experience recently? Is it smooth? I hope everything going well! Recently, I read a question by someone on the Gather Town community about setting up a poster. I remember that it’s an easy task to do. Gather already have some poster objects on their object picker, and it’s ready to use. But I found out that this feature was gone. I search for a poster and I can’t find anything. Maybe that’s why they were asking for that. For someone who know about editing pixel art things, it’s not a problem, but for someone who barely knows about this, I think it will be a problem. No worries, in this article I will explain to you about How to Setup a Poster for your Presentation in Gather Town. Not only that, I will share some cool platform that can be embedded into Gather to enhance your presentation experience. So let’s go to the next section!

What’s a Poster in Gather? What is it used for?

At the early era of Gather Town, there were so many levels of groups who use this platform. From classroom, community, events, and working place. Gather is more than just a virtual meeting space like Zoom or Google Meet. The main power of a virtual space platform like Gather is the way we can place some object that can be interactable with the participants. One of the most useful feature is a poster object for presentation. Why is it so useful? Because more than just doing a live presentation, we can embed our presentation there as an object so people could see it anytime. Just imagine it like having a 24-hours museum.

Recently, this object isn’t there anymore. I don’t know why Gather delete this objects, maybe it’s just a mistake, I don’t know exactly. Don’t get me wrong, the interactive object feature is still there, but the poster sets object is not. See the image below to get what I mean by poster sets.

Basically you can use any other object to place your poster object, like a whiteboard, or a statue, or even a fountain. But for people that love this kind of poster sets and booth sets, it could be annoying not to find your preferable objects there.

How to Fix this?

At first, I said that for someone who now about editing pixel art, it might not a big deal. Yes, it’s not a big deal. Because you still can upload a custom sprite into Gather. So as long as you have the sprite, you can upload it and it will works like it used to be. One of the drawbacks by using this method is you can’t easily rotate and changing the object’s color like how you did on Gather default objects. You need to edit the sprite to to do it. Here I will share to you the sprite that you can easily upload into Gather, with many color options, and also size options.

I will share the link to the sprites at the end of this article. In case you don’t know how to upload a custom sprite into Gather, I will explain it on the next section. If you already know it, just skip it to go to the recommended platform for poster making section.

Upload the Poster Set into Gather

To upload a custom sprite into Gather, you need to have an access into Mapmaker. If you don’t know about Mapmaker, you can see in my previous article about it here. After you have an access to the Mapmaker as a Mapmaker role, open the Mapmaker. On the Mapmaker dashboard, click the ‘More Objects’ button on the top right. Then a new panel will appear, you can see on the bottom left side, the ‘Upload New’ text, click it. After it, drag one of sprite that you want from the sprites asset that I share into the big ‘drag image’ box.

On the right side, choose the kind of ‘Object Interactions’ you want. If it’s a picture, then choose embedded image. If it’s a video then choose embedded video. Me personally always use embedded website for embedding contents, from picture, pdf, slideshow, and video (except video that more than 150MB), since for me it’s lighter than choosing the embedded image. But there are some kind of configuration you need to do to convert the contents into a link. It’s not hard, just tricky. If you want to know more about this, you can read it on my other article here.

If you are confused on how to do the things that I explain above, watch this video below instead.

Adding Image Icon into The Poster

The poster sets looks so empty, I want to add a picture icon or my logo on it, how to do that, Julio?
To do it, firstly just prepare the picture/logo that you want. Then you need to compress it into the designated pixel size. One tile in Gather is 32×32 pixels, so if you have a 3 tiles horizontal poster sets, the picture must be under 96×32 pixels minus the offset that you want. If you see on the sprites asset that I shared, you will see one pdf file. On that pdf file, you can see the optimum size picture for each of the poster sets.

Resizing Image

You don’t need to have a skills on pixel arts editing, you just need to open this website to compress your image. The website name is PicResize. Upload your image, then click the ‘Continue to Edit Picture’ button. Then scroll a little bit, and you will see the drop option-box to choose your size, click it and choose ‘Custom size…’, and type the size there. After it, choose Save to disk to download your file. Make sure to prepare your raw image horizontally to get the best result. While placing the picture icon, just hold Ctrl/Cmd to make the object off-grid to adjust the position easily.

After that, just upload it into the Gather like how you upload the poster sets before. For the best visuals, you can apply the object interaction on the image icon instead on the poster sets. So just choose the ‘No interaction’ for the poster sets.

If you are confused on how to do the things that I explain above, watch this video below instead.

Voila! Your poster is ready to use. Don’t forget to do a simple check to check whether your poster works well as you want or not before publishing the space. On the next section, I will share some cool platform that you can use as variation on your poster. Sometimes just adding a simple image or video will be boring, and you need some touch of interactivity on it. So if you are interested, just go to the next section!

The Cool Platform Worth to Try!

I have 2 platforms that I usually recommend for my client when they are asking for another thing to do add interactivity into an object. The first one is Genially. This is a cool platform to make an interactive content. Basically it’s more like a power point or google slide, but it’s easier to use. It’s basically a free platform, but it has a paid-tier if you need more feature. Here you can make a quiz, interactive map, presentation with a multiple choice, or even a simple visual-novel game with a branch ending if you dare to explore. They also have a lot of default template so don’t worry to try. It’s not that hard to start. You can link the Genially embeddable link into Gather town object.

The second one is Padlet. It’s basically like a post-it message board. Here you can share a post-based presentation and people could add some reaction to it or even give a comment to it in real-time directly from the Gather Town. If you have a peer-to-peer presentation, this platform is worth to try as it will be fun to give a comment on one poster, and then go on to the next poster and so on. The free tier provide you with 3 boards for the limit. You can always delete some and make a new one, as long as it’s maximum 3 boards used at the same time. If you think the paid-tier is worth it, you can use the paid-tier or you can ask your co-workers or students to make their own account. You can link the Padlet embeddable link into Gather town object.

The Sprites Asset

Now you are ready to make your poster sets on line. Here is your free sprites assets you can download. Just click it and it will automatically downloaded into your desktop. Feel free to give a comment if you want more free sprites like this.

If you still have any question related to this tutorial, just left a comment and I will be happy to answer if I can. Also if you want to work with me, I you could email me anytime here, or visit me in my Fiverr here. We can discuss more using another platform if you are prefer to. Please consider to give a little appreciation by going to my Ko-fi site to give me some coffee if you feel this tutorial is helpful. It will be appreciate so much for this site development. See you next time in the next article! Sampai jumpa lagi!