If you are looking for a video conferencing system probably Calla may be an excellent option for you and it is that for several days the project which is being developed under the Jitsi Meet audio and video conference system was announced, which allows several participants to speak simultaneously.
Generally, during online conferences, only one participant is allowed to speak, and simultaneous discussions are problematic.
About Calla
In Calla, to organize communication natural, in which several people can speak at the same time, It is proposed to use navigation in the form of a role-playing game.
The highlight of the proposed approach is that the volume and direction of the sound They are established according to the position and distance of the participants from each other.
Turning to the left and to the right changes the position of the stereo sound source, making it easier to separate voices and make communication more natural.
Chat participants move around the virtual playing field and they can meet in groups there.
For a private conversation, several participants can move away from the main group, and to join the discussion, it is enough to approach the crowd of people on the playing field.
Flexible customization options are provided, allowing you to define your own virtual cards and customize the interface design to suit your needs.
As such Calla It is not a new video conferencing system, but is a container library for Jitsi Meet that adds audio specialization, to be able to create virtual meeting rooms and above all to give it that special role-playing touch.
Calla adds a small RPG style map at the Jitsi reunion view. It gives you an avatar to walk around the room and in it users choose where to sit in relation to other users.
The project is written in JavaScript, uses the developments of the free Jitsi Meet platform and is distributed under the MIT license.
Try Calla
For those who are interested in being able to test this video conferencing system, they can give it a try by going to this website.
Here simply they must make a record, where they will assign a username and will be asked for their email.
After that they will be able to choose the room where they want to enter and voila, with that they can try Calla.
Now regarding the installation of the system, at the moment it is not possible since the developer is making some revisions and modifications to the code.
But as soon as the new installation instructions are available, they will be able to do it on their own server.
As already mentioned at the beginning, Calla works on a Jitisi facility, so they must have a facility of this or if they have not done so, they can advance the process by following these instructions.
The first thing they should do iss have gnupg2 installed and install Jitisi from the official channels of your distribution.
In the case of Ubuntu, Debian and derivatives:
sudo apt install jitsi-meet
After that you must configure the server domain (or if you will not only work under the IP of this only that it is recommended that it be configured with a static IP) and configure the DNS.
To configure the DNS we must type:
sudo hostnamectl set-hostname meet
Then add the same FQDN in the / etc / hosts file, associating it with the loopback address:
127.0.0.1 localhost
x.x.x.x meet.example.org meet
Note: xxxx is the public IP address of your server accompanied by the configured domain, if you do not use a domain, just leave the IP.
Now we just need to add the Jitsi package repository, in the case of Ubuntu, Debian or derivatives:
curl https://download.jitsi.org/jitsi-key.gpg.key | sudo sh -c 'gpg --dearmor > /usr/share/keyrings/jitsi-keyring.gpg'
echo 'deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/jitsi-keyring.gpg] https://download.jitsi.org stable/' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jitsi-stable.list > /dev/null
# update all package sources
sudo apt update
Finally enable the ports for Jitsi, you can do it with the ufw firewall:
sudo ufw allow 80/tcp
sudo ufw allow 443/tcp
sudo ufw allow 4443/tcp
sudo ufw allow 10000/udp
sudo ufw allow 22/tcp
sudo ufw enable
If you want to know more about the Jitsi configuration, you can consult the following link
To be aware of the new Calla installation instructions, you can check them here.