The Team Menu

The Team menu is your key to locAR's 'multi-user' capabilities. It allows you to join or leave a 'team' of up to 9 other locAR users (why the limit?). While you are within a team you can share your location plus other navigation data (heading, etc) and exchange text messages with all other members of the team.

The Team menu also presents the List menu button which allows you to see the UID, distance and bearing to each team member and control your transmission of data to each one individually. (TIP: if you have just started up locAR for the first time, go to the List menu now to read about controlling your location transmission and then come back here).

Finally, you can select War-loc! mode from this menu and have a go at blasting your fellow members out of the team altogether (in the nicest possible way)!

Team Identity

The concept of a 'team' in locAR is very simple. It is a group of (up to 10) users who have submitted a join request with the same team name and password. Note the emphasis on the password ... A team's identity is defined by both its name and its password.

This means that, for example, a team with name "myteam" and password "pass1" is a completely different team to that with name "myteam" and password "pass2" - even though they have the same name. Remember this when joining a team, as if you enter the wrong password you will have your very own team created for you but won't be able to see anyone else!

Team names can be up to 15 characters in length, capitalisation is ignored and non-alphanumeric characters are removed. Passwords are similar (including being case-insensitive) but are limited to 10 characters. It's OK to create a team without a password, but that greatly increases the chance of unrelated groups ending up in the same team.

There is no need to register or otherwise 'manage' teams - each is created 'on the fly' when the first person joins it and is deleted when the last person leaves.

The Team Name Tips page suggests conventions to help you find other locAR users with whom you might share a common location, interest, etc.

Team Membership

It's important for all locAR users to be aware of whether or not they are in a team at all times. There are three major reasons for this as, while you are in a team :-

your location and other navigational data are continually being sent to other team members

if metering is enabled your team credit is being decremented by the second

the greatly increased messaging required to keep you connected with all your team members adds to network/server loading and potentially slows down system response time for other users

Join

To join a team just enter a team name and (optional but recommended) password and press the Join button. If you are already in another team you will automatically leave that team before joining the new one. Note that if you press Join with no team name specified, the most recently joined team name and password (if any) are re-used.

Please Note: If you have just started up locAR for the first time you will not have any team credit showing (it will say "NO CREDIT" in the white box). Ignore this and press "Join" anyway - your initial team credit (50 hours or 2 hours for the demo version) will then be added.

See the result when you have joined your team.

Leave

If you no longer wish to be a member of any team just press the Leave button. Make sure that you see the "(NO TEAM)" message in the yellow box to confirm that you have left (this may take several seconds) as you are still treated as 'in' a team until this is shown.

Prev, Next and Del

The Prev and (when displayed) Next buttons scroll back and forth through previous team name and password pairs (most recent first). The Del button (when displayed) deletes the currently selected entry.