Tool: Meeting

Meeting allows sharing a scene between two or more ChimeraX instances running on different computers. Its main purpose is to allow multi-person virtual reality (VR) sessions in ChimeraX. It can also be used without VR, but in that case, a desktop screen-sharing program may be a more reliable alternative. Each participant is represented by a head-position image and hand-controller pointer cones so that participants can see each other pointing at objects in the scene. For non-VR participants, the camera view is synchronized, and the cone indicating the mouse pointer position of a non-VR user is displayed to others when the user pauses the mouse over a model, as for picking.

The Meeting tool allows changing some of the major settings for ChimeraX meetings, a subset of those available via the meeting command.

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Dialog Settings and Buttons

The Meeting dialog can be opened from the General section of the Tools menu and manipulated like other panels (more...). Settings other than meeting name are remembered as preferences. The current settings can be reported with the meeting settings command.

• Meeting name – a text identifier for the meeting, assigned by the person who creates the meeting and used by other participants to join the meeting. Meeting names are not case-sensitive.
• Participant name – a text identifier for the individual within the meeting environment
• Pointer color – a color for the particant's hand-controller pointer cones in VR, or mouse cursor position if not in VR (initial default lime )
• Photo – an image to represent the participant's headset position in VR

Buttons:

• Create – start a ChimeraX meeting with the specified meeting name
• Join – join an existing ChimeraX meeting with the specified meeting name
• Leave – exit the meeting
• Options... – show additional meeting starting and joining options.
  • Start meeting using server. Initial default chimeraxmeeting.net is a publicly available computer that forwards connections to the computer that started the meeting (needed when the latter cannot be reached by participants because it is behind a firewall). Server direct connects directly to the computer that started the meeting. To add a new private meeting server to this menu, see the meeting server command. See also the instructions for setting up a new meeting server.
  • Join meeting using ssh. When joining a meeting ssh can be used to help get through an outgoing firewall around the joiner's computer that limits outgoing connections on unknown ports with unknown protocols, or firewalls around the server that limit incoming connections. To use ssh with a server other than chimeraxmeeting.net requires that the joiner have the ssh key for the server defined with the meeting server command. Default is not to use ssh.
• Help – show documentation in the Help Viewer