Introducing Car Mode!
Virtual / hybrid meetings are part of our everyday life now. Some meet in their home office, kitchen, slouching in the couch, while taking a walk, or even while driving! We won’t encourage you to have meetings while driving since any distraction can be fatal, but we know many are doing it and decided to implement a distraction free mode for those who choose to have a meeting while in the car.
On the latest Jitsi Meet beta version (22.2.0) you will notice a new button in the drawer: Car Mode. This will open the car mode screen, a brand new in-meeting experience which has the basic meeting controls like ending the meeting, selecting sound device and microphone muting, but with enhanced sizes so you can easily use them without much distraction.
Car mode also saves you bandwidth as it disables all incoming/outgoing video streams, for a distraction free meeting experience. Another useful feature in car mode is push-to-talk: simply long-press the un-mute button to keep the microphone active and release it to automatically mute again. Push to talk is especially useful for passengers in the car, or when joining a conference while having a stroll. That’s right, you don’t need to be in a car to use this feature!
CarPlay
Those of you with Apple CarPlay enabled vehicles may have noticed the car did not show up in the sound devices selection and this created some confusion. This has been fixed and you’ll now see an entry in the audio device selection drawer:
More to come
This first iteration of the feature only opens the car mode when selected from the toolbar button. We are planning to add automatic detection for the user being in a car and automatically offering to switch to this mode in that case.
Android users: worry not, better Android Auto integration will come!
❤️ Your personal meetings team.
Author: Horatiu Muresan