A fork of Calla, which makes use of Calla to support better online learning. Calla itself is a wrapper library for Jitsi Meet that adds audio spatialization, to be able to create virtual meeting rooms.

Kaksha (Hindi word meaning classroom and orbit) is a video conferencing app designed for synchronous delivery of online education. The app is intended to mimic the acoustics of a physical classroom, and give the participants the feeling of being colocated.

Students join a virtual classroom and place themselves on virtual seats in the classroom. The acoustics of this classroom mimic that of a physical classroom in the sense that sound decays with the distance between the virtual seats. Participants will be able to only listen to other participants located closer to them, unless a participant talks loudly enough to reach others located away from them.

We hope that the app will have the following benefits:

• Students can interact with their closeby neighbors without disturbing the rest of the class
• Instructors can conduct group discussions and activities in the app itself, without making the students break out from the main conference call.
• Shy students or students with low confidence would benefit as they will be able to still participate by interacting with their peers instead of the teachers.
• The app can go beyond learning and be extended to enable activities like games, potluck lunches etc.

• Open Kaksha on a desktop (Link accessible till 9 Dec 11:59PM AOE time).
• The server uses self-signed certificates which your web browser will likely not trust. If your browser shows a security warning, and blocks the page, you can safely ignore the safety warning, and continue. It’s possible that some browsers will not allow you to open the link no matter what. Try opening the link in Mozilla Firefox version 83 and above, as this is the version used to test the application.
• Allow access to input sound and video devices. Kaksha will not work if you haven’t allowed it this access.
• Provide a username.
• Click connect.
• Make your buddies join the same classroom.
• Move around in the virtual class relative to your buddies and enjoy the sound acoustics in action!