Show HN: Elevator party – An interactive small talk experience
elevatorparty.chat
elevatorparty.chat
This is a tiny little thing that me and a frequent collaborator [0] wanted to express in these challenging times. What if people miss something as awkward and forgettable as elevator small talk?
Right now, there are virtual places where we can meet, collaborate, do yoga, talk about books, watch content together, and rave. This virtual space gives you an analog that is a little more from the daily inbetween times.
After long days of video calls at work, we ended up doing more video calls each evening to get this wrapped up. Overall this small concept took four weeks to finish. In the process I primarily learned that there have been notches in screens for a few years now.
The whole thing is built with Clojure and ClojureScript. And largely leveraged Sente [1], a wonderful front+back end WebSocket story. The characters are customized from the amazing Open Peeps library [2]. And there is some more info in the (?) on the website for the curious.
I am curious about what this community thinks about little, possibly zen, distractions like this?
1. Restrict it to 3-4 people max in each elevator. 2. Add in audio and close the room in 1 minute.
Audio is definitely something we want. Had a nice elevator bell lined up! Will try to get that added sometime this week.
re #1, it would definitely be more usable with higher visitor traffic. One of our goals was to let people be in the same elevator if they send it to their friends, at the moment that is done by only having one elevator haha. Not ideal!
Something to consider: maybe being able to string random small-talk related words or phrases together, ala magnetic poetry[0], would result in more interesting chatter.
The fact that some of the people have no eyes and a weird sort of eye thing for a nose is confusing.
Also there are too many people in the elevator for the necessary awkward silence between comments.
After a certain amount of small talk you should get awarded the opportunity to actually choose what to say. Thats kindof how it works IRL.
Are other people in the elevator operated by other actual users online, or are they randomly generated? Honestly, it's indistinguishable from random.
Are you supposed to be "conversing" with the other thought bubbles that appear? Using the 10 phrases you're allowed to use, which because they're meaningless you cannot tell whether someone is actually responding to your input or just a bot putting up phrases?
The sentiment is nice, but I have to say, 4 weeks to build this seems... unfortunate.
Maybe I'm not getting something about the UI that is obvious.
Later in the design we added some details to hopefully get that across to as many people as possible. The biggest being "connect to other humans" that bounces in over the elevator button before you can call it. The others are maybe a bit too tucked away in the info (?) area.
I think with the amount of traffic in the last 12hrs everyone does start to look like a bot though!
(Seriously, this is adorable. Great work!)
tbh I don't get the point of this...it's boring and useless(for me)... it's nice project for learning or demonstrating the technical aspects behind it...