Then again, I'm also of the opinion that video calls provide little value beyond phone calls, so maybe I'm just a grump.
You can see what our own office looks like here: https://staging.gather.town/app/oxrhEtb3sV7VutbQ/GatherOffic...
The problem that we've heard a bunch is that people feel disconnected from their coworkers, because you don't really get to interact with them socially anymore. Would love to get your thoughts--do you not feel like you have this problem, or do you think gather.town doesn't solve this?
In order for this to work I'd have to work all day with a camera on my face, if I understood this correctly. This sounds awful to me.
I do think this would be really cool/fun for events, but for day-to-day work, I'd absolutely hate it.
Yeah I wasn't sure, is that what they're suggesting as the use-case? Always-on video and mic sounds awful, even if most of the time no one sees it. My home is not my office, my "home office" is just a desk in my living room and I share this space. So opening a window to my home is, frankly, unwelcome.
https://support.kaptivo.com/hc/en-us/categories/360001386698...
It looks like you'd rent it out for an event or such. I can see that it would be a bit of a fun - if we're all on video / phone chats all day & we need to do a 'virtual offsite' it would be good to change the environment a little.
I can see this being useful for the occasional planning day etc.
I would probably really dislike using this with coworkers or for "in the office." But I can imagine it being a good fit with some of the other, more social use cases.
One I'm personally a huge fan of is Mozilla Hubs (https://hubs.mozilla.com/), which is 3D and VR compatible. It's not accessible enough to people today, but it's very, very impressive!
And MakeSpace: https://makespace.fun/
And GroupRoom: https://grouproom.io/
But gatherly doesn't seem ready to serve my family and I if I have to request info (I can't just sign up).
What's the best, simple app like this that allows easy subconversations that my family, parents, other non-technical folks could easily join?
I don't mind paying to host but it has to be easy for them to log in and use.
In particular, since there's no formalism around creating or scheduling meetings, it makes it extremely easy to walk up to people you know, chat for a few seconds, and then step away. Or for impromptu meetings to break out, where two people are chatting, and then another person joins, and soon there are 5-10 people in a larger discussion.
What it hasn't been able to resolve (at least for me) is the awkwardness of starting conversations with strangers. This is already awkward enough in person, where you kind of have to edge your way in to an existing conversation and wait for a lull to join in. Starting a cold 1-on-1 without reading body language is just not possible for me.
Remotely, there's no way to get over the step function of "in the conversation" where your face just pops up. For me, that lack of a gradient makes it very difficult to break the ice when meeting new people.
I think the physicality of Gather does help a bit, because (for example) you might sit at a "let's talk" table to indicate you're open to meeting new people, but that still basically translates to "extroverts go here". I'm not sure how to solve it long term, but I think tools like there are definitely a step in the right direction.
One is when someone is alone. Are they actually still physically present? Are they waiting for someone? In person, I can see if someone is actively scanning the room and appear open to a conversation.
The second is when a group of people are already engaged in a conversation. Are they discussing something a bit more private? Are they speaking my language? Do they appear open to having more people join the conversation. In real life, I can hear parts of a conversation from a distance and look at how those in the conversation are positioning their bodies relative to one another to make some judgements on this.
Emojis are the body language of the web.
In scientific conferences, typically at the end of the day (e.g. after dinner, with drinks) you have "poster presentations". These presentations look pretty much like these images from Google [0]. Everyone goes to a big room, and the presenters stand in front of their posters which are ~90x120cm. People walk around looking at the poster titles figures, and when one of them catches their interest they stop to listen to the presenter (if they are already taking to a group) or ask him about it.
The fact that you have these big posters at all ends up being just a cue so people can identify who is working on which kinds of subjects/projects, and go talk to them about it. My advisor had this really funny idea of having "microposters" at a conference, where he just taped an A4 paper with one figure and the project title and his name to his back, and that is all it took to start conferences. It worked super great, it was exactly what it took to "break the ice".
In these conferences people will typically have read your papers, but they don't know your face, or even that you were in a paper (at most they will remember first author or last author, which is the professor). So just having a small cue "I'm Bob and I work on X" is already sufficient to break the ice.
My suggestion would be two things: 1) For mimicking the poster presentation aspect of scientific, to allow people to upload an image which gets displayed on an area of the map. Then the presenter can stand there, and interested folks just gather around him to listen.
2) Allow some kind of mouseover view that shows additional information about the person, eg a bio, a description of the projects, or a picture/link to a description of the projects.
I haven't yet seen a good virtual scientific conference, and it is exactly this aspect of the social interactions that is missing. In the end of the day, the primary reason why scientists move halfway around the globe to gather in a hotel for a few days is not to so much to listen to the speakers as it is to gather in small groups at breakfast/lunch/dinner/happy hour/breaks, and exchange ideas and get to know each other. Academic conferences allow people to put a face to the names they see in papers, and it really helps make science feel more humane and prompts you to exchange more.
Thanks!
[0]https://www.google.com/search?q=scientific%20poster%20presen...
For a very small remote organization, Discord would definitely be my go-to choice to start with, but privacy concerns and the fact that it stops working well with more people involved would eventually be a blocker.
Makes me think there must be something up with their security, I can't think of any other reason why they wouldn't give private paid plans for businesses.
There are a LOT of people who would jump over from slack.
It was also really bad for privacy. You have to opt out of “automatically share window titles with everyone”, and Do-Not-Disturb still pops up notifications when people ignore the badge.
Just lerp from one-square to another over 120ms and ... scratch that, if I had implemented as nice a product as yours, I would just implement click-to-move. So your character smoothly moves to where you clicked (with a touch of A* path-finding).
Only gamer's understand WASD, everyone understand's clicking.
As a game-dev I'd recommend storing position as two variables on the client. One where the user is in the server's memory, and one where the user is locally. Smoothly move the player locally to match the server and scale it exponentially the further off the two are. I'm pretty happy to chat through this if you'd like to?
If you get smooth-move right I'll happily sing your app from the roof-tops at work and with family.
Good to see someone solving this hard problem!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL39BF9545D740ECFF
Congrats ! I think you're onto something.
I would readily pay for this if I could get my entire team to adopt it. (which I'd say is nearly impossible)
I might sound like making a deal with the devil, but if you could integrate your service into MSFT teams, you might be able to get a huge user-base quite fast.
In general, mature teams do not adopt entirely new communication styles just because they are better. It usually takes something that is either revolutionary (eg: when Slack first got popular as a move away from email). Or, it is a seamless addition to what they already have and doesn't rock the ship.
I'm not sure what you guys are using for the engine, but the primary feedback I have is that it feels too sluggish. For a second-home virtual space, it'd need to feel really good moving around in it.
Right now on my 2019 Macbook, in a one person blank room, I have frame rate drops moving around where my character will skip spaces. And in the HN room going to a different place (e.g. to swimming pool), I was walking around in darkness for 5 seconds about to exit thinking there was a bug before it finally rendered. Would recommend you guys really nail constant FPS as a priority.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 1fgR7oeIXFA
Btw here's the doc of yours that said it was p2p, I guess it's outdated. Might be good to remove or update it. It was publicly accessible within the demo instance linked in this thread, as an asset in the "sponsor" room.
- Document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vR8RTTH8Dr1KwiWE...
Under platform overview: "Stack Video is streamed peer-to-peer via WebRTC. Uses Firebase (Google cloud storage) for the database Works on Chrome / Firefox, and on any laptop or computer. Tablets and mobile not supported yet."
X-
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was the arrangement if I recall. I think the spaces thing would work well but sounds like it could remove some of the fluidity of meeting anywhere, bumping into people in the 'hallway', etc.
I think it’s a tricky to judge whether re-inventing the wheel is important and would yield better results or one should just stick with the norms.
And I genuinely believe that we definitely need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to workplaces. Trying to translate a physical workplace to a digital one seems logical but doesn’t feel right. And more importantly, if you come from that side, it surely makes the transition easier for people, but makes it very hard to re-invent the wheel because your lens (how you look at the problem) is now biased.
But then how do you re-invent the wheel?
I think one way is to just question everything and see if the past conclusions still hold true in this new reality. Once you have enough conclusions, you can maybe begin to think about how to model a solution with those conclusions in mind. Makes sense ?
https://alex.gather.town/app/nO9uzqf6ZhzsXJ68/Grand%20Centra...
^^no guarantees on the stability of this server btw, I use it just to test random stuff so it might go down at any moment!
Yikes. As someone who's worked remotely for over a decade, I can't imagine starting a company with people I've never had a beer with.
- Have an option to start camera/mic turned off, and make it clear that your camera feed will be visible to people you approach. My own camera view and mic (and the option to turn them off) are also kind of easy to miss on my 27" screen.
- If I press and hold, say, S and then tap D, the avatar starts moving right and doesn't stop moving right until I release S. I'd expect it to continue moving downward when I release D.
Facebook is hosting a networking event for PyTorch Developer Day through gather.town so I am interested to see how that goes. Maybe I will see if gather.town is indeed significantly better for a social event vs. attending posters.
More specifically:
1. First off, the other conference took advantage of Gather.Town's full functionality! This included not only proper poster displays, but also sponsor screens with video embeds, virtual booths with actual humans milling about and an easy-to-navigate floorplan reminiscent of a real poster hall (numbers and all). At ICML, most of us were juggling multiple Zoom links and often forgot to or neglected viewing certain presentations because it took much effort to keep up.
2. In the same vein, ICML's poster session had none of the discoverability or ease of browsing of a physical poster gallery. You couldn't just walk past a poster, notice a crowd asking questions and pop by to listen in for a bit. The somewhat non-deterministic sorting/filtering functionality on the talks list page didn't help either. I saw a number of presenters awkwardly asking idle attendees if they had any questions, as well as folks waiting for a no-show presenter that had probably logged on for 10 minutes, seen an empty room and left the call. Gather.Town mitigates these phenomena by replicating some of the physical signals/affordances of a physical space with actual interested people around and thus makes the whole business of interacting around a poster feel more natural.
3. Post-conference, I saw many comments on Reddit and elsewhere from presenters frustrated by the lack of audience interaction and apparent appreciation/meaningful discussion for their work. It's crazy that some posters at a top-tier conference like ICML didn't get a single visitor. I think that's indicative of how poor the UX (discoverability, spatial cues, ease of browsing, etc.) was for that poster session. A platform like Gather.Town doesn't solve all of those issues, but man does it help.
I understand the pixel art style (I love it btw) and that the map is actually discrete pieces of tiles instead of fluid/pixels, but it's really visually jarring as I move around. If I move by pressing arrow keys once at a time that's fine, or if I even hold down arrow in one direction that's still okay, but if I move by quickly changing directions (e.g. moving diagonally) it almost hurts my head to look at the screen while my avatar is walking.
I've tried Gather and a few of the other competitors out there - out of all of them Gather nails the UX the most. It's pretty simple, but it's also powerful. Most of the other competitors in this space have thrown together a sloppy "business" platform, but Gather just feels much more accessible, friendly, and easy to use.
This actually seems like a really good idea, taking both the sense of place/community that you get from games, and the productivity and environment that you get at work or a conference.
I like it.
I'm Phillip, cofounder of Gather https://gather.town/?ref=hn. We are a video-chat platform that creates virtual spaces for offices, conferences, events, and social. You walk around on a 2D map, and see / hear the people near you.
We started more a year and a half ago, on telepresence for your closest friends and family. We explored all sorts of technologies like custom wristwatches, tablet apps, tele-operated robots, and VR. We were in the middle of one of our VR experiments when COVID hit, and we decided to switch focuses on the pressing needs of people today.
We had an idea for how people could gather better online, generally. Some of you may have seen our HN post launching Online Town half a year ago, and since then, we've hosted 1000+ paid spaces across conferences, offices, weddings, parties, magic conventions, universities, and much more!
Many "real-life" interactions translate easily into Gather. For large gatherings, people will split off into separate groups to talk, and walk between the conversations by just moving their avatar around. For remote teams, you can walk up to a coworker's desk to ask them a quick question, or notice a group of people congregating at the water cooler and go join them.
(Our own team works out of a Gather office--most of our team has actually never met each other in person)
What's unique about us is how much you can customize your own space. Our tools let you design any layout or style that you want, so many of our users replicate their real life offices and community spaces. We also have embedded objects you can put in your space. For example, you can work at a whiteboard, watch Youtube/Twitch videos together, or play games with other people in your space.
Right now, we're offering one month trials for office spaces, as well as setting up custom office layouts for teams, for free!
Come check it out and meet us in the space we made for HN: https://gather.town/?ref=hn ! We'd love to hear your feedback.
I think it could work in virtual reality with Facebooks' emotive expressions, face tracking, etc. But if I'm in the middle of a workday, moving a little 2d character around doesn't feel very useful. But perhaps I'm wrong!
If this type of idea does actually get strong PM fit, the market size could be huge. So for VCs it seems like an interesting bet to make, even if the odds of success are low.
My immediate response was to shut off my camera and drag my icon all the way to the corner of the screen so I can work alone. If the goal is to reproduce the distracting nature of the open office, I gotta say projects like this are a huge success. Also, streaming live video all day every day for no reason seems like a waste of resources on all parts.
I can see how this would be a cool tool for normal social events like parties and conferences though! Just not every day work please.
Additionally, you may want to check out https://www.sococo.com/ which is another competitor.
I personally think this space is going to be big as people adapt to permanently remote or fully remote.
I'm getting closer to an MVP, and am interested in finding a co-founder. I'd love to find people interested in this space!
I tried it for 20minutes and wanted to connect to random people, but noone seems like they wanted to talk ! they just walk away (and going after them looked like harassment ).
Been using Gather.town at RecSys conference, and that was very exiting. I love the mechanics and UX, it reminds me Pokémon FireRed on GameBoy.
Just out of curiosity, how is your retention is doing? I understand, you probably has very heterogeneous users – some of them purchase one-time per-seat plan, some of them use it as an office replacement, but though. My concern is how this 8-bit mechanics works in the long-term.If you can shed some lights on that, would be cool.
- What tools have you used successfully? For what number of people concurrently?
1/ What's your strategy to standout from the pool of virtual event tools?
2/ Are you keen on being interviewed on https://virtualmojito.com/ - It would be awesome to showcase your stories.
I can be reached on Twitter. Let's chat!
Has anyone here tried both? I personally like the style of Branch a lot more, and movement seemed a lot smoother.
Do you have any plans to add a zoom feature?
But I love it.
