Four Seats, Five Cameras

In the real world, if you came across a couch and three seats with some of your friends, sitting down next to someone on the couch would be a social signal: one of status, alliance or attraction depending on context. I’ve therefore always been slightly uncomfortable with the 5-seater groups in There, so I was really interested to find that Paradise Island’s new clubhouses are outfitted with these rather nice 4-seater groups.

At first I thought they were just four chairs and a table, but you can soon disprove that by observing that you can zoom in on the faces of people in the other seats. That doesn’t happen in ad hoc seating groups made up of individual chairs.

It turns out that although these new groups have four places to sit, their “experience” is the same as the old 5-seater groups. So, there are five zoomed camera angles, two for the chair that is really a “couch” and one for each of the others.

Even more amusing (at least to me), the 5-seater experience is so fully replicated that one of the chairs has the infamous “no emote” behaviour. Once you locate the “couch” chair, try sitting in the chair to the left of that and issuing an emote like 'tu and observe that… nothing happens.

These clubhouses have some other nice touches, too. The seating group next to the (animated) fireplaces works like a team platform, with an MC slot and enough room for an audience of 14 avatars (seven seated with another seven standing behind). The general style is a lot more realistic (or at least less cartoonlike) than we have been used to in the older Tiki islands.