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Comment by snikch | Hacker News Reader

I've been thinking about this too. In fact I've started hacking on an app to solve this for my group of friends. To me the two primary issues are:

1. Sub groups without losing the context of the full group. I want to focus on a set of people and chat with them while also aware of what other groups are around. I want to be able to bring people into these groups at will. This also adds a gamification aspect where you can adjust groups, i.e. randomly mix, mix people who haven't talked to each other yet etc.

2. Multi monitor. I want to see everyone and real estate is limited on a single screen. I should be able to add multiple windows or computers to my chat and have everyone spread across those windows. Only one window / computer will submit video and audio for me though.

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There was a jit.si post on here where someone made a 2d map. If you were standing close to them on the map you heard the if voice. Further away people were ignored.

If I remember right there was an app from the early 2000s that did something kind of like this. It would be cool to combine the 2D map with a speech-to-text word cloud over clusters of people so you could see if you wanted to join another conversation.

Mumble has positional audio for game stuff - https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Positional-Audio its also extremely low resource usage and you can install/manage it yourself.

I really prefer it to discord/whatever other voice client because you can also do stuff like hierarchical broadcasting, a parent channel can broadcast to children without children broadcasting back.

https://meet.primrosevr.com/#FromGithub

There are a few Minecraft mods that implement this kind of behavior, and I could swear I saw it baked into a shooter game somewhere but I can't remember which one.

Not exactly a shooter game, but Second Life has had this feature for a while based on Vivox and OpenAL (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Voice/Technical).

What if your chatting was also at a lower volume for other groups so if one group organically disbands, can pre-hear what some groups are talking about to join in. Feels like a pretty natural experience in social gatherings.

>Sub groups without losing the context of the full group.

Different 'rooms'? You could keep the video tiles for all people on screen organized by room, then the individual chooses which one to join for audio. You could include a push-to-talk 'announce' button to send your audio to all rooms in addition to the normal open mic in the room you belong to at that time.

I picture a mosaic of webcam feeds that have border lines drawn to indicate group members.

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