What you are looking at¶

A circle is a ring of people around a centre, over a background your host chose.

The ring¶

Everyone in the circle, including you, appears as a circle around the edge. Your own circle is one of them — you see yourself the same way everyone else sees you.

Positions are worked out from how many people are present, so the ring rearranges itself as people arrive and leave.

The centre¶

The middle of the screen is the speaking position. Whoever currently has the centre appears there, larger than everyone else. When nobody is speaking, the centre shows whatever the scene puts there — an image, a video, or nothing.

How the speaker appears depends on the layout your host chose. See Speaking and the centre.

The scene¶

Behind everything is a scene — a background image or video, and optionally something in the centre. Your host picks it for the room; you cannot change it.

Scenes are set up by site admins, and a host may also override the background or centre for one particular room.

When people appear¶

A person appears when their video does. Not when they connect, not when they are listed as present — when there is an actual picture of them.

This means a circle can be quieter than the participant count suggests for a second or two while someone's camera starts up. That is deliberate: an empty placeholder standing in for a face tells you nothing, so nothing is drawn until there is something real to draw.

Practically:

Someone who has just joined may not be visible yet, briefly.
Someone whose video has frozen keeps their last picture on screen rather than vanishing, with a spinner over it, while the connection is repaired.
Someone whose camera has gone away entirely will be taken out of the circle — see Sound and camera.

Muted people¶

Someone who is muted is shown with the muted treatment on their circle. Almost everyone is muted almost all of the time; see Sound and camera for why.

The menu opens the actions available to you: getting back to Settings, reporting a bug, and — if you are the host — the hosting controls. See Hosting basics for those.