[HN Gopher] Chatmosphere
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Chatmosphere
Author : tosh
Score : 58 points
Date : 2021-01-20 15:53 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (chatmosphere.cc)
(TXT) w3m dump (chatmosphere.cc)
| bluetwo wrote:
| I coded a similar prototype during covid and predicted we are
| going to see a lot more of this now that WebRTC is pretty
| universal, and also that people are comfortable with the concept
| due to Zoom and others being everywhere.
|
| I did a virtual pub crawl based on the 12 pubs in the movie The
| World's End, and it was a lot of fun. We had a really good time.
|
| What I'm curious to see are the more creative uses of this. Yes,
| we can make virtual rooms and connect people in a common way, but
| it seems like there needs to be some creative brainstorming
| around new was to organize and interact. I would love to join
| with others to explore these concepts.
| nyellin wrote:
| Interesting. I coded a prototype like this with a few friends
| after we saw gather.town. We decided to focus on language
| learning communities because that is an area where people are
| already using online platforms to meet strangers. (We also
| thought about dating usecases.) We've since abandoned the concept
| to pursue other ideas, but here are some thoughts:
|
| 1. Current platforms don't recreate the experience of mingling
| that you have in real-life. In real-life you can be doing one
| thing (getting coffee from the kitchenette) and overhear an
| ongoing conversation which you then decide to join. Is it
| possible to recreate that serendipity online? (We thought about
| running speech-to-text on all conversations and showing them in
| bubbles in the ui so that you could see what other people are
| talking about before you join the conversation.)
|
| 2. People want to express themselves in ways other than speech.
| In the real world you do that via your clothing, the stickers you
| put on your laptop, the look on your face, etc. How can you
| recreate that in a digital world? Should you let people
| "vandalize" the room by drawing on it?
|
| 3. Is this something that people will have on throughout the day
| to hang out with friends? Is it something you use only at a time
| scheduled in advance?
|
| 4. I play chess online with friends and anecdotally many other
| people have started doing that in the past year for obvious
| reasons. Can you embed those types of experiences in Chatmosphere
| so that I can hang out with friends and do actual activities with
| them where other people can drop in/out of observing? (The same
| applies to watching youtube videos together, playing video games,
| etc.) Gather.town is trying to do this, but I didn't like their
| implementation when I last checked it. Bunch is also in this
| space, obviously.
|
| 5. There are a LOT of competitors in this space. (Mozilla Hubs,
| Rambly, Tengable, Calla, High Fidelity, Teamflow, Movement,
| Sococo, etc.) What is unique about your solution?
|
| I've thought about this a lot (and coded a small poc) so I would
| be happy to chat in more detail if it helps you. (I'm no longer
| pursuing this myself.)
| teacpde wrote:
| I really like the idea of showing bubbles with text that gives
| a peek of conversations other folks are having. I just realized
| that to "eavesdrop" conversations before deciding to join or
| not is one of things that I miss most while working remotely.
|
| Imagine remote working as a sims-like game, where you map
| everything into the virtual environment, e.g., sit in your spot
| and code for an hour, where you occasionally can peek the text
| bubble of nearby colleagues; you take a break and go to the
| kitchen and meet people there; you walk to somebody's spot for
| a conversation ...
|
| That would make remote working a lot of fun.
| nyellin wrote:
| Exactly what I had in mind. The ability to eavesdrop + the
| ability to see who is open to chatting and taking a break.
| vgel wrote:
| The problem with that for me is I don't get up and go to the
| kitchen to talk to people -- I get up and go to the kitchen
| to {heat up lunch, make coffee, get a glass of water} -- and
| a serendipitous conversation happens as part of that. That
| sort of guiding activity makes the conversation lower-stakes,
| if it lulls you can focus on your pour-over or whatever, and
| it's timeboxed by the length of kitchen activity more or
| less, letting you get out of a conversation politely if you
| want. A virtual kitchen doesn't have that -- if I'm getting
| lunch I'm going to be in my IRL kitchen, not in the virtual
| one, and I'll be talking to my wife, not someone from the
| office. That means if I go to the virtual kitchen it will be
| expressly for the purpose of talking, and it's no longer a
| serendipitous conversation, and the dynamics become more akin
| to a language learning conversation group where you go to
| talk to people, and everyone knows how awkward those can be.
| (You could maybe more charitably compare it to meeting up at
| a bar as the OP does, but you only go to a bar to talk with
| people you're already close to, and getting close to people
| tends to happen first through repeated, unplanned
| serendipitous conversation. So these tools work OK for
| friends to keep in touch, but in my experience onboarding
| during COVID, not at all to get closer to coworkers.)
| sathorn wrote:
| > Gather.town is trying to do this, but I didn't like their
| implementation when I last checked it.
|
| AFAIK they embed games / etc. in an iframe. What didn't you
| like about that?
| nyellin wrote:
| The implementation was buggy and the interaction between the
| virtual world and games was unintuitive. A better interface
| would seemlessly embed the games into the virtual world
| (perhaps inside a "picture frame" or "portal"). This isn't an
| aesthetic complaint. It would mean that spectators could walk
| by and see what is going on in the games - just like peeking
| around a space in real life.
| woah wrote:
| This is always funny. I, and everyone else in the world, had the
| same idea during covid. I never built mine, but I did put
| together this spreadsheet of competitors. There are around 50
| separate projects doing the same thing:
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1R5DXWtz4H7eIT5VbGYJE...
| conradev wrote:
| Having done a census of all of them - which do you think is the
| best?
| [deleted]
| nikivi wrote:
| I didn't know the demo will join you into a room with random
| people :D
| farnsworth wrote:
| Yeah, I just want to see what the heck this is without going on
| cam...
| tosh wrote:
| I also think that replacing the video feed with an avatar
| (upload or choose) would make it even better.
|
| One of my favorite features of Clubhouse is lack of video.
| That said, afaiu Chatmosphere is an open source project so I
| guess it would be easy to add as functionality if no-video
| isn't already configurable somehow.
| feralimal wrote:
| This re-routing around a genuine problem is sad to me. I think it
| is the unstated acceptance that the 'new normal' is in fact here
| to stay.
| o_____________o wrote:
| Cool. The volume proximity logic should be tweaked a bit so you
| can still see people's videos without lowering the audio. As it
| stands, seems like you have to overlap for full volume.
|
| Maybe some kind of clustering logic where an entire group can be
| equal audio? Similar to creating a folder from two apps on
| ios/android home screen.
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(page generated 2021-01-20 23:01 UTC)