As an adult, many of my most meaningful relationships have come from my work environment. When working remotely or in a distributed setting, however, I find this not to be the case. Existing tools such as Slack and Zoom simply don’t cut it. Individual productivity may benefit, but the culture is fundamentally lacking.
As a leader and someone who has founded and built a large company, I have experienced first-hand how critical it is to have a highly engaged team. This affects everything from communication to culture and company values. Moreover, there is a lack of innovation that spontaneous whiteboard sessions and more fluid communication styles afford.
Spot is the culmination of a year of research and development to recreate a highly engaged workplace with smooth and natural interactions. (Not to mention, it is also a lot of fun!). Would appreciate some feedback from the HN community.
If you're an HN regular, I guess you were expecting a comment like this - is there an open URL we can use just to get a feel for it?
And I don't think using a fake or alternative email is an option.
And now I am stuck in the tutorial because it wants me to zoom in and out with the mouse wheel or the track pad, and I am at my desk with my computer closed and plugged into my monitor and my Wacom tablet and it doesn't recognize using the touch ring set to 'scroll'. It's sure not doing a good job of suppressing Safari's right-click menus when I hit the stylus button I have set to right-click to rotate the view, either.
I guess my main curiosity is how we get people who don't believe virtual communication/living is the same as in-person or at least capable of being socially fulfilling. Does Spot do anything special to attract the people who go in with cynicism?
Why should anyone use this over a competitor?
Here's my summary:
* The world is easy to move around in and manipulate, which is rare for a 3d space (as opposed to Mozilla Hubs for example)
* Video chat showing up on peoples heads is much nicer than in a separate section like Gather.town
* Hear people per-room, rather than just volume attenuation is a better solution for larger meetings
* The screen sharing on a wall is such a nice and intuitive way to glimpse content from afar but still be able to full screen it
That said, my team is on Gather and we will stick, largely because we have team members on slow laptops and the 3d world of Spot makes the fans spin.
What’s going to be the pricing model moving forward. Surely voice and such can’t be free in perpetuity.
Nice work!
<a bit of a plug coming up> We've been working on solving similar problems but going about it differently. Rather than a shared virtual environment, we're looking for better ways to connect real, distributed environments. We created https://sharetheboard.com because we simply didn't want to give up the whiteboard sessions. Reading here though I wonder if some kind of mashup wouldn't be interesting? A real whiteboard session could easily be displayed on the wall of your virtual office, allowing for serendipitous participation... Let me know if you're interested and we can discuss.
First, this looks like a cool idea and could be useful. But we are on Internet so going directly to the problems.
In both Firefox and Chrome on windows 10 the fps was mostly around 30 fps when moving around, some times dropping down to 5 fps. Probably because of this I kept getting stuck in furniture. There was also something that did feel off when looking around using the mouse, not really sure what maybe it only was lag. On most demos on Babylon and Three, and on other games, I get solid 60 fps. I am sure the experience will be much better if you also manage to get close to 60 fps.
We're 100% focused on communities and human connection, not on office work or commercial tools :). But work employees can be a community as well and strengthening the bonds you have with your coworkers is a great use of Topia!
Topia is all about creating real relationships built upon shared experiences and memories. We have tons of fun features to help world builders create unique, connective experiences.
I'm replying because a video overview would go a long way to explaining/demonstrating your idea. Not everyone wants the ordeal of signup to see what it's gonna look like.
Hope this helps.
Personally given the corporate cultures I've been in using a spacial social chat environment feels like it would lead to rather forced interactions, unnatural intrusions, and micromanagement of execs seeing interactions as something to be mismanaged rather than an organic phenomena. When used in a purely social sense the tools seem great and plenty novel (due to lack of hierarchies and allowing multiple unrelated conversations to form and occur simultaneously), just not in the current application domain?
Who knows, perhaps I just have been dealing with orgs with bad culture, but I struggle to see the concept adopted well. Great looking execution though despite my reservations.
I cannot see my teammates walking to the water cooler, I cannot see some teammates grouping up to discuss, I cannot give a sense of whether I'm interruptible or not. Because what we see are those avatars that do not reflect our current state at all.
3D spaces are fun and I'm very fond of games where I can pretend to do work. However I do not actually exist or work in there, and the moment I start doing actual work I stop role-playing my character around the game.
At the moment Spot has "headphones mode" which signals to others that you prefer not to be interrupted. It also temporarily mutes notifications and other things, just like putting on real headphones in real life would. We're very conscious of these things, and coming from UI/UX research I believe it's paying attention to these fine details that add up to a great product overall.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this – I previously founded an always-on video presence startup[1]. We were building for our own problem as founders, as is often the advice you get given! – However I think this is a case where founders are actually unique and what works for a group of 2-3 founding folks really does not scale well to a broader team at all. This is also what we saw with our product, it worked well for small tight-knit groups but rarely did teams above 10 adopt in a meaningful way.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/11/sqwiggle-makes-working-rem...
2. We are investing a lot in asynchronous modes of communication. Our chat system is already pretty robust (easily drag drop files, reactions, etc.) but we also have some big plans here.
3. Customizable and programmability are first-class citizens. Everything is totally customizable in real-time within the same experience. We also envision this as a completely programmable world. Slack is really powerful because of its integrations, but we think having a spatial interface like this actually unlocks some super interesting things. (e.g. imagine updating having your CI build change the color of a light on a desk somewhere).
2. Again, these features are already prevalent or under active development by many of your competitors.
3.Also not novel.
Context: we moved into a much smaller house a few years back and I miss having a room dedicated to shelves, both for books and for music. But most of my reading and listening has moved to digital anyway, so there's really no need for such a space anyway. But it would be amazing to have a digital rendition of such a space, particularly if it could be done in VR. Ideally would tie in with APIs such as Goodreads or Spotify, so you could visualise your digital library in a physical space.
And like with haram_masala's comment [0] about having some "classic office layouts", this would do the same but with classic libraries or record stores.
Just me or did Hackernews hug the site to death?
Not trying to discourage you, but if they are indeed similar, I don't think Sococo has been much successful and they seem to have been trying this for more than 10-12 years if not more.
I'd really love to see a take on such product from an experienced game dev team.
Not quite like being there, but pretty fun.
Or, an “App Store” for interior designers and artists to sell office spaces and furnishings.
Working from home since late 2008 myself, I've felt the drawbacks extensively. So when I discovered Spot for the first time, I felt that this truly addressed many of the challenges of working from home. Some of these are the dilution of corporate culture, the loss of rituals and ceremonies, and the loss of chance encounters and spontaneous conversations with coworkers. People working from home over long periods of time tend to feel increasingly more disconnected and unseen.
Location and presence can be powerful enablers and are great ways to communicate what's happening in a team, resulting in richer social interaction. I can imagine how nice it is for a team to see who's in the meeting room right now, or who is hanging out in the lounge area and likely up for some small talk. I can see how that would make me feel more connected than just staring at a bunch of channels or joining video calls.
I'm especially excited about the greater long-range potential of a powerful spatial interface to communication and collaboration. There are many things and nuances we are paying very close attention to in order to bridge the gaps and make it feel as natural as possible.
Another aspect I like a lot here is that the design of the space to which you invite people conveys something about who you are as a company and team. I remember getting invited to Dropbox HQ a few times and the space itself had a personality to it that I liked a lot. I can imagine inviting clients and letting them arrive in a virtual lobby with photos on the walls highlighting some really cool things about our product or so, and then picking them up to walk through our virtual space to the meeting room while telling them about the features our engineers are currently working on as we pass their desks.
https://github.com/billmei/every-proximity-chat-app
Who will win?
It even has a first person view, wow!
Focusing on the looks of whether or not we’re in the right virtual space unfortunately detracts from the actual communications themselves.
We don’t need to rebuild a full 3d virtual office where everyone has a personal avatar to wander around the space, in order to communicate with our office mates. If you want that, just go build your office in Second Life.
But keep in mind that there’s a reason why Second Life doesn’t have a population of hundreds of millions of people — that concept doesn’t scale, and there are many of us who actively avoid 3D MMOs.
1. Couldn't everything be expressed more easily in 2D
2. Would living in this for long time feel like a simulacrum that gets depressing after a while?
There are so many videos out there mocking the WFH experience and the loneliness and dehumanizing elements that literally making your entire work experience from a virtual physical world further and further distance ourselves to being overly siloed and non-social creatures? Even if features make remote work better (I haven't actually used it), it seems to me to be missing the point when going in this direction at all.
We also do virtual visit but from photos https://free-visit.net/fr/demo01
I envisioned something better looking, but it does not matter.
It does not feel exactly right, something is missing, but I can't put a finger on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
oh wait that's the url I tried to put in the video screen, the "copy invite" link isn't working for me on Safari, never mind
