Board Wand

[blinkybool]

This is a few different features encapsulated into a single wand that you can wield from your backpack.

• Ability to copy, save, and paste "pages", which are just snapshots of a board. This would be accompanied by some inventory of pages with little thumbnails. This can be used by both presenters and audience members. Presenters can store and resurrect key slides from earlier in the talk. Audience members can copy a board and continue some calculation, or save it for the end of the talk to ask a question about it (they can put it on their personal board).
• Personal board printing. This is somewhat of a novelty but ever since I knocked over a brickwall board with writing on it, which then stayed floating in the air, I've wanted to be able to "print" a personal board. You place the personal board, draw something on it, then close the gui, pull out the wand and print it. The board disappears (with it's content cleared) and the lines remain, fixed in the air. Maybe they have CanCollide on as well.
• Printed drawing destroying. There should be an easy way of removing these lines. You should be able to walk up to some printed drawing, whip out the wand and Avada Kedavra it. There could be more ways of removing curves. Like an admin could just nuke all of them.
• Multiple board creation/removal. You can spawn multiple personal boards and drag some adornment to resize them. Perhaps some limitations should be enforced here. This spell might be too powerful.

A good UX/UI is important for this. So here's a picture of what I'm imagining

You would see the three buttons on the right pop up when you equip the tool, and then the pages window would show when you have the pages button selected. You can then drag and drop pages from a board to the window, or from the window to a board. This would account for both desktop and mobile use. Not sure exactly how interaction should work with printing and drawing destroying on desktop and mobile, i.e. how to pick which board and how to perform the action.

I think the adding/removing/resizing boards could be something identical to pages, with it's own window. It would work the same in terms of dragging boards into the world, not sure exactly how you'd remove them.

I think the current equip/unequip to spawn/despawn the personal board will need to be rehomed to some internal functionality of the wand. Otherwise when you equip the wand, the personal board will be unequipped and disappear. Should personal boards be replaced by the generalised board creation/removal?

[dmurfet]

These sound like good proposals to me.

• Copy/save/paste seems well motivated by use cases and I think the UI idea is sound.
• Personal board printing. Yeah sounds cool. Manifesting the creative will of users is a core value of metauni: seeing and participating in this creative process is one of the keys to unlocking the virtual format beyond Zoom. Some of that creativity will come from interaction with the world, some is expressing talent in music or visual arts. You could imagine people putting up directions to their talk, temporarily annotating trees with integrals after a talk, etc. All of that will help to liven up the place. However there are resource constraint issues and potential for abuse, so I think this should be hidden behind a new tier of permissions, see below.
• Multiple board creation/removal: I think this is great. Moreover these boards should optionally be persistent, both in their contents and position. Imagine in a private server like Circular Concept that you stroll in, lay out a few boards, start writing on them and pick them up and move them if you wish, and this just feels like permanent furniture.

I am strongly in favour of the dynamic board creation and placement, because I think that while in principle anyone can install metaboard in Roblox Studio and lay out their boards in exactly this way, I think it's clear that in practice a vanishingly small percentage of the users of metaboards will actually do so. They will encounter and use metaboard (in my opinion) through events, and through seeing low-friction ways branching off from existing worlds to set up their own private niches that they then fill with boards and stuff. So in practice the dynamic board creation and placement will greatly empower users.

We could give this ability to anyone with Scribe permissions. However it seems to me that we should grant that permission very liberally. My current policy in the metauni group is that once I have seen someone in an event and they didn't burn the place down I give them scribe permissions. If we start empowering anyone with scribe permissions beyond their current "abilities" there will be a tendency to be more restrictive in granting the permission, which would be a serious mistake I think.

So that suggests having another level of permissions above Scribe, perhaps Fellow. These get PB printing and dynamic board creation and destruction.

I don't think we're likely to encounter people with scribe permissions deliberately making trouble with these abilities, but until they've attended a few metauni events they may not understand that they're being disruptive by using the abilities in certain ways. Moreover as board placement and world decoration with text or drawings is something that adds or detracts to the "spirit" of the place, it's worth putting it behind some filters of trust.

Of course, this is balanced by the fact that anyone can and should spin up a private server in which they are god and have all these permissions on their own turf.