Show HN: Bigroom.video – better video social events

Hello Hackernews!

Over the last couple of months I have been working on a new way to have social events over video (https://bigroom.video).

As with the rest of the world, my last company transitioned to being completely remote with the rise of covid. We tried to emulate our old lunchroom and bar happy-hour dynamic over Zoom, but found that we could really only have one person speak at a time. With a 20 person Zoom lunch, this turns into each person telling a story one-by-one, people stepping on each others' toes, and a loss of the small dynamic conversations that would normally happen at any social event.

Bigroom has two major features that help bring the dynamism back to socializing.

Dynamic channels let you break off into a separate conversation with one click. At any social event I've been to, people are always separated into groups of 3-6 and individuals bounce between those groups. Dynamic channels allow this behavior without the rigidity of Zoom breakout rooms.

Whispering temporarily mutes your audio to everyone except one person. Click-and-hold on someone's video to start whispering, and let go of your mouse to stop. It's possible for two people to have a complete 1-on-1 conversation within a large group of people by whispering to each other.

Bigroom works on desktop Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, with mobile support planned. On the technical side, Bigroom consists of a web client and a websocket server, both written entirely in rust. I used the elm-like yew framework compiled to wasm for the frontend and async-tungstenite for the websocket backend. The entire client app compiles down to <1MB.

All video and audio is transmitted over peer-to-peer WebRTC connections. This puts a natural limit to how many people can be actively using video in a single channel (depending on the computer I find it is between 10 and 20), although I am considering a client-server architecture in the future to make it scale similarly to zoom.

Bigroom is in free open beta and doesn't even require an account to use.

Looking forward to your feedback!

-Kevin

I’ve been using bigroom for a few weeks now to catch up with friends and family. It makes an unbelievable difference when you can have multiple conversations. It’s almost like you’re at a dinner table! Highly recommend this. Zoom feels like a work meeting, and this feels like a social gathering.