Show HN: Online Town – A better way to gather online
hn.town.siempre.io
hn.town.siempre.io
One of the creators here.
It's a cross between Zoom x Pokemon. You only get audio and video from people you're standing next to, and as you walk away from them, the video fades away and the audio drops off.
With current video chat apps, you lose many of the dynamics of real life meetups. In particular, you lose the ability to have multiple people in the same shared space having multiple conversations.
In real life events, you can talk to a few people at a time while still being able to quickly go from one conversation to the next. With video chat, you have to talk to everyone at the same time.
Online Town is meant to fix this.
The way it works is, when you're near someone you get their audio and video, when you walk away from them their video drops off, and their audio fades out.
So you can have multiple conversations within a single virtual space.
Join me in the public room! Would love to get your all thoughts on it :)
We had a great ~10 minute video chat in the middle of the street about the possibilities of virtual realms. I've just popped him an email and sent some techno recommendations :).
Good luck with Online Town! I think we'll see a whole spate of similar ideas focusing on a variety of niches.
Just tried online town (I'm on Firefox 75 on Windows) with my girlfriend (she was on her ipad), and I could see my video in a box, and she could see her video in a box, but we couldn't see each other. The fade in/out worked on distance, but only of the box - no audio or video of each other.
She was also initially unwilling to enter the room as she thought she'd be in a room with three men (from the sample image given when visiting a room link) - I know it says 'on the left there's an example', but maybe that might need replacing?
Really great idea, though, and much needed at the moment!
One thing I wanted right away was to enlarge the video feed of one person so I could better see him, attend a presentation, etc.
The other "need" is that I wanted to interact more with the environment and play with others, even if I have no specific idea.
Anyways this was very fun and I'll try in my company next week, many thanks again!
A lot of community building questions still apply though and I'd love to see them answered. How do you plan to deal with nefarious characters or just general sexually motivated trolls (if any)? Is there moderation of some kind? Community rules in general? Sign up integration in the future? I couldn't find it on the home page (though I may be thinking too much about it - the whole purpose of this might be a 'real' virtual world with sign-ups being a redundancy)
Either way, do not, in any way take my comment to be nit picky or leaning towards the critic side - I'm a genuinely interested user. Just an inquisitive one :) All the best.
Yes, in stealth mode around 5yrs ago but couldn't get funding for launch. It was too early and too general. High battery drain didn't help either.
"iSee is just like being in the real world, where your voice fades out with distance and you walk around to talk to others and look at what interests you."
Thanks a TON to Cyrus for being such an engaging host and sharing his thoughts about what's going on and how people are thinking about the service!
Something I noticed is that you can collide with other characters, so if you have three other friends, you can effectively isolated people by collaborating and standing around them, and there is no escape but to reload the page.
This is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time; brilliant.
Is this open source? If so, I would love to contribute.
I was thinking a minimap would be nice, or maybe a dash option so I could get around a little faster.
For helping people find each other faster, it seems like just having maps with more landmarks might help too!
It would be cool if I could upload my own PNG or something to use as a town backdrop.
It would also be neat if I could click people and find where they are on the map, or maybe just jump to them.
I understand the map is supposed to be NYC. I would use something more people friendly (you don't need car-centric roads when there are no cars!) with more greenery. Right now the map feels a bit odd to me, a bit like a post-apocalyptic world. Maybe that's appropriate for the current time.
...Skyrim meetings confirmed?
I wonder if you would consider open sourcing the map creation component? I’d love to contribute
I tried this for a passover and unfortunately the servers were really laggy at that time so we stuck with zoom/Jitsi and gave up the fadeout
For primoserver, it’s similar but definitely needs a larger map, appeared to have lag issues on calls.
Thank you for making this! I had a blast. (Guy - Australia)
A suggestion, I can basically create multiple 'people' by opening the app in multiple tabs, though it does seem to know me because the nickname seems to remain the same, maybe you should look at a way of allowing a single persona at a given time, if that is possible?
Another thing I think would be great would be shared virtual backgrounds depending on where on the map you are. My team has tried to hack this together manually (standups taking place with everyone having a background photo of our abandoned office space,etc) but an automated zoom plugin or similar would be great.
It gives an easy-going/fun vibe to the game.