MakeSpace – Virtual Spatial Chat | Hacker News Reader

MakeSpace – Virtual Spatial Chat

makespace.fun

136 pointstheanirudh39 comments

Super cool! Having spent so much time in Meet in the last months really makes me think about the future. We should have technology that outperforms face to face meetings, rather than just getting as close as possible to the "real thing". Why can't I do the following:

- see who's who (bio)

- have pre-determined roles in the meeting (Mary is here as technical specialist on x.y.z.)

- have a set goal, agenda and timers per section

- have a feedback form after/during the meeting

- have stats about the meeting (who was actively participating, maybe via gaze tracking or seeing whether the tab is in view). We're they speaking aggressively, friendly, etc.

- give automatic feedback about your own sound quality (hey, you should really invest in a good headset)

- allow in-system meeting notes, such as decisions made and actions to be taken. Maybe even automatic?

- have voting / polls

- give audible feedback (claps) rather than the wall of mute icons

- have a button to add participants to the call if they are late (it would call their phone, pull rather than push).

- sub-rooms and spatial audio are also a great idea

But no, instead we get virtual backgrounds and the never ending "sorry, I was on mute".

My prediction: In 5 years, online meetings will be so much better than they are today.

Many of those things already exist and are popular in virtual worlds and in social games. In software in general there's a lack of knowledge of what's already been tried.

This looks like a great start though.

Definitely agree! League of Legends and TF2/CS:GO stand out as games that have a huge community that builds a lot of analytics tools for in-game activity data. Most times, the community tools are way more feature rich and comprehensive than game dev tools. Definitely a lot to learn from games

I've seen some demos of VR based virtual worlds and it's really really cool. Downside is not being able to see facial expressions, and no one I ever have meetings with has a VR headset.

I already commented below, but that's pretty much what we are aiming at with https://laptopsinspace.de It's not VR (on purpose), but instead it has facial expressions and some gaming feel to it

The biggest challenge is background noise cancellation... it can severely degrade the quality of a group call. Most of the others can already be done... and in this case, embed of q&a/polls, document.. can be defaults when setting up a new call.

We run a pretty strict "mute when not speaking" policy and it's working very well. I think giving users automated feedback about the quality of their sound is a much simpler problem to solve. Not as sexy as AI powered noise cancellation, but I think it would be much more effective in the short term.

> - have stats about the meeting (who was actively participating, maybe via gaze tracking or seeing whether the tab is in view). We're they speaking aggressively, friendly, etc.

This is one's dangerous. I'm actually finding it hard to think of a use case for this where it isn't abusive and oppressive.

Here's one: If you see high disengagement, you know you have to improve as an organizer or that the person should not have been invited.

You can also ask participants for their feedback.

Yes, but the point of all my suggestions is to make things automatic.

Besides the feedback to the organizer part, there could be all kinds of stats about the meeting, compare to the stats of e.g. a sports game. If you have a pool of sales reps, and you want to help them improve, you can compare the stats: on average you ask 2 questions per call, while the average rep asks 10, etc..

Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of nefarious use cases, but there are definitely positive ones as well.

I can see the use cases, but the nefarious ones kind of obscure this prospect.

Maybe the negatives could be mitigated by doing the automated analysis on the client and asking the users if they want to send the feedback, similarly to how crash reports for software are often done.

Yeah, that might be a good mitigation! It will never be perfect, but that's life ;)

The context for my point is that we already have authoritarian countries (i.e China, Russia) already using the internet for mass surveillance (and selling the technology to other countries), we have Trump (who has to be considered at least a quasi-authoritarian at this point) purging civil servant who are insufficiently loyal to him.

And these are not power that will have intrinsic knowledge or care about things we may understand intuitively: the error rate of a prediction model, false positives/negatives in classification, the difficulty of producing a reliable model of human emotion, how easy it is to build bias into a ML model, etc.

Agreed, the feature could be used for bad purposes. Does that mean we shouldn't build it? That's a tough question.

You are absolutely right. I don't want my teachers to know that I am not actively attending the class and doing something else.

Also, even if this feature gets implemented, someone will defeat it easily. ( Example: Teachers ask you to keep your camera feed on during the class? OBS + Virtual Camera )

Is this an idea or a product? The site is wordy, dense and has no link to a download. I can't find a release date, pricing, a business model -- anything worthwhile except very fancy mockups.

The same thing as https://spatial.chat/?

Wow, that site really misses a demo (which does not require giving them my email address). Ironically the same way as Makespace misses a way to try out the advertised features.

Also https://www.highfidelity.com/

Looks interesting. Been trying out spatial.io that does feel like where this is heading. You hear people differently dependkng where they are in the virtual room - like you would in the real world - also when avatars got close to each other it felt awkward (in a cool way).

That doesn't sound terribly difficult to do with 2 channel audio and a handful of participants. I imagine you just assign each person a location around a circle and do the 2-1/2 D sound mixing, eh? Why don't current group conference things do this out of the box?

https://ask.audio/articles/creating-a-3d-mix-with-two-speake...

It's a somewhat limited approach. For more convincing positional audio you can use a HRTF; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function

Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA

It was surprising to find Aza Raskin involved in the project, but it seems they are not really after users at this point given the whole complicated Get Involved thing. Very nice and interesting landing page though, I would love to use it right now!

Looks so awesome. The spatial audio feature would be a game changer if implemented correctly. The hold caps lock to broadcast your voice globally seems like a super power that should be limited to the admin or something though :O

Is this less a videoconferencing system, and more of a first draft of a shared multiuser (and given Aza Raskin's previous tech demos, hopefully also multiscale/zoomable) desktop environment with videoconferencing built in? Because that would be super cool.

Really liked the idea of the "room" metaphor over using mute buttons. Also using the CAPS to broadcast your voice at full volume to get attention (a feature best reserved for respectful teams).

I loveee the concept of drawing rooms with a mouse to enable spontaneous conversations. the site is incredibly wordy and doesn't drive a CTA, but that is really nice. when can I use it?

No everything on the internet needs to be about pixel trackers, A/B testing, micromanipulating users, conversion rates, ARPU, analytics and all that boohoo. Can we just pause for a second and be honest with our users? May be respect them? Try to make insanely great products that people have no other option than to fall in love with them?

In fact, I want to go to sites that don't lie to me and backstab me, treat me like some kinda of a ephemeral datapoint consuming their giant wad of VC cash.

I call these people sales-assholes or salesholes.

A/B testing is in fact often used to make insanely great product, how would you otherwise know what your users actually want

> how would you otherwise know what your users actually want

E.g. with regular user testing.

Probably not applicable everywhere, but could replace a/b testing for some products.

Perhaps understanding the problem deeply, thoroughly and putting yourself in the shoes of the customer insteading throwing a bunch of semi-random iterations over the fence and squeezing every last bit of data from the customer's private behavior?

Imagine if I buy tomatoes from the grocery store, but they run an A/B testing on me to see what the customer wants - may be I prefer the 85% ripe ones over 95% ripe ones, the farmers watch the reaction of their users as they cook and taste tomatoes in a live video stream from their customer's home. WTF, get out of my house (browser). It is my private property. I just want a goddamn tomato (send an email or post a photo or read news).

What happened to user's privacy? That last mile optimization is bothering me as a user.

In many cases A/B testing, conversion rates, analytics are used to actually improve user experience and create a better product. I don't think the problem is the analytics themselves, but what you do with the data. For example, you can see based on analytics that users spend more if feature A is implemented but they have a better experience and rate product higher if feature B is added instead. The stats allow you to have this insight, but then it's up to the company if they want to go for profits only or to actually create a better product.

We are developing a similar idea, but in 3D instead of 2d https://laptopsinspace.de

(No mobile support yet)

This is super cool, though I get stuck on "waiting" after giving the website access to the camera and mic (and reloading)

that normally only happens if your webcam is already in use, but we surely need better user feedback for that... I'd be happy to trouble shoot it with you on twitter, dm me at @neeshstudio

Resembles trember.me/video/

Yeah, know this one too. Easy to gather people there. They keep on adding features.

How’s the performance?

I’d love to use it, but I’m afraid my low-end MBP will turn its fans to 1000%

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