Calla – spatial video conferencing software based on Jitsi Meet

I never tried Metaplace but it reminded me of The Palace which I did spent many hours of my youth on. It would be interesting to see if these 2d chats have work-place benefits over the current Slack/IRC experiences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Palace_(computer_program)

Notable game designer Raph Koster was involved in Metaplace and his blog included a lot of making of/behind the scenes articles and discussions from around that time, including some post-mortem thoughts.

> What keeps blocking them from mainstreaming?

Most likely it is business model. Getting the spatial model correct is a lot of work, and making it generic enough to be reusable is even harder. (Both Second Life and Metaplace flirted with idea of being platforms that other services could build on.) It's easier to get some financing for it as a "game" (it's also useful to note a bunch of Metaplace ideas came out of experiments in failed MMO Star Wars Galaxy), but it's harder to sell it as a general chat application (much less platform) or especially as an "Enterprise tool" if it looks too much like a toy or a game. On the flipside it's harder to build it as an Enterprise tool first, because the impulse to keep things sparse/spartan/"profesional" also leaves a air of "lifelessness" with not enough things to do outside of/between meetings/during downtime inside of meetings, not enough of a feeling that it is a space to "inhabit" rather than visit briefly because a meeting required it.

These business model bootstrap hurdles are a criticism I often bring to a lot of the conversations about why the Cyberpunk "ideal" of a single shared VR space (including the one most recently popularized by Ready Player One) seems so extremely unlikely in the real world.

(Aside: Ready Player One especially suffers from a lot of basic game economy mistakes and likely shouldn't have survived very long in its world for very long, much less have taken over nearly everything including education and enterprise so much as it did. My reading of the book was that the game economy directly caused a lot of the collapse and dystopian economy outside of the game, which made the book better than the author seemed to have intended as further reading and other evidence suggests the author was not aware of how terrible the economics of the game were, they were just fun ideas thrown out for verisimilitude.)

IT had not rung a bell until I clicked your link and as soon as I saw the picture I remembered immediately - thanks for the reminisce.

I was thinking that the old 2d / move around 3-d kind of space chat from waaay back - worldsChat - you had an avatar and moved around a space station chatting.. I always wondered what held that back from being more popular / more used by more people..

Which brings me to the time of having all sorts of friends and family pinging on yahoo messenger for a while - then that was killed off.

Perhaps if worldsChat had this spatial talking kind of option it would of gotten more traction. I'm sure moderating and other factors also apply.

Yeah, someone told me that a few weeks ago.

Calla is a type of lilly. I name all of my projects after plants. Originally, I named this project "Lozya", which is the Hungarian word for "vines", because Jitsi is the Hungarian word for "wires". But nobody could pronounce it correctly, so I renamed it.

Incidentally, I work for a foreign language instruction company. I brought it up with one of our teachers and she didn't think it was an issue. She said that, in context, it wouldn't be read as "shut up", that it's kind of like "lead" (to guide something) and "lead" (a metal) in English.

speak now or calla forever

Would love to use this for post-conference hangouts. How many users have you had logged in at one time before issues kick in?

Edit: And is it possible to self host?

We've a few spatial chat apps pop up in the past few months. It's part of the reason we set out to build https://align.link/, an extensible video chat platform.

Products like these (and others like https://www.macro.io/) could exist as meeting apps, allowing people to to tailor rooms specific scenarios like one on ones, retrospectives, happy hours, etc.

I've used Gather for a couple virtual conferences this year and I was surprised how much I liked it. It's obviously still no substitute for in-person gatherings, but it does recreate some of the atmosphere of being in a room full of people while still being able to have meaningful small group conversations.

There is a camera/mic selection option. Lower-left corner, next to the mute-audio/video buttons, there is a button labeled "change".

That's actually what I'm doing for my day job and part of why I originally built this. I built the 2D map for Calla because I was still in the middle of converting all my VR work from Unity to WebXR. But pretty soon, VR will be possible.

Technically, Calla is just the library for driving Jitsi and adding spatialization. You can do whatever graphics you want with it. The graphical elements and the interactions are all up to you to build, separately from the teleconferencing.

You mean like in

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_Project

and later

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cobalt

?

Have we not been living through the same pandemic? Nobody in the US has a reliable internet connection, services are controlled by third parties and randomly black out, infrastructure is overloaded, meetings are insecure, people step away from their keyboards and are unreachable, there are screaming kids in the background, etc.? I would happily board a plane for work travel right now, this is like living in a parody of my previous job.

I had originally thought of 3D. This isn't my first time making a spatialized audio chat system. I built one for WebVR some 4 or 5 years ago. And I'm actually building one at work right now (with Calla as the underpinning). But for when I started this project (at the beginning of the pandemic) and for what purpose I built it (testing the current temperature of the waters in WebRTC land, as I hadn't done a lot with it since that last app, plus trying to support a weekend tech meetup that was finding Zoom to be a bit annoying, plus seeing if FOSS WebRTC libraries were at a level that I could use for my day job), I wanted to make the graphics portion of the app a simple as possible, support the most people as possible, and not get in the way.

One thing I've noticed with a lot of the "competitor"[0] apps out there is that they're more focused on the graphics than the audio. They're more focused on making a 90's-era RPG than on audio conferencing. I'm the opposite. I'm more focused on conferencing than the game. I get a lot of requests in the github repo for functionality in the game. The "game" is beside the point. It's just an exercise of the audio conferencing.

[0] I don't really see myself as in competition with gather.town or High Fidelity or any of the other apps because I'm not building Calla to be a startup. I love my day job and I won't be leaving it. Calla is just a component of a much larger thing I'm building.

You can build whatever interaction system you want on top of the thing. Calla is a wrapper around Jitsi to add the spatialization and communicate user state between users.

https://github.com/capnmidnight/Calla/blob/master/Calla/doc/...

As for the server costs, I'm not going to use anything other than Azure. Most of the cost is bandwidth, but it's worth more to me to keep everything in one place and not have to worry about learning another PaaS system. From the other offerings I've seen, Azure is usually only more expensive at the most lowest of tiers. Once you start scaling up, the other vendors get just as expensive. So I'm fine with shelling out a few more bucks here and there to avoid having to use something else.

He better hopes no one will start using it. The biggest cost factor is the bandwidth. 30 people can easily generate a steady 100 Mbps usage. A conference for 15 people is about $3/h on any cloud provider

1996 is many years to late, maybe 118 years[1], maybe 14 years[2] but late anyway. Hard to say [3], but to answer your question: "no, probably not"

1: The Telephonoscope was already imagined in 1878: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Telephon...

2: William Gibsons is often credit with the idea of "cyberspace" as in a virtual environment where people choose their own avatar and move around interacting with each other, with systems or data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Chrome#Reception

3: Gibson might have played MUD in the 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD1

I have no idea what you're talking about

Is this a statement disguised as a question?

That's mostly not been my experience, so I guess it depends on the group of people you're with. But when it does happen, I still think it's better than Zoom because you still get the directionality of voices and you don't have the useless video stream distracting the view.

It doesn't. I'm not looking to make a living off of Calla. I have a day job that I really love. Calla is a component of it.

Often they don't, or they offer support like Wordpress. Drupal, etc,

Yeah, especially on the browser it’s like setting off a bomb.

This is one of those ideas that just found its time. I was by no means the first to make a spatialized audio chat system. I might have been very close to the first to release something after the start of the pandemic, but it's also not even the first time I've built spatialized audio chat into a system.

My first experience with spatialized audio in a chat system was AltspaceVR, when I first got into working in the VR space, when they interviewed me for a job (sadly, they didn't understand their own product enough and insisted that I'd have to move coasts to work with them). That was easily 6 years ago.

A couple of years later, I built my own VR-based spatialized chat system. It was way too early. WebVR was way too much friction for users[0].

Incidentally, Calla has all the necessary parts to be usable in a VR system. And I'm using it for that in my day job (VR environments for roleplay scenarios in learning foreign languages).

I don't remember why exactly I open sourced this project. It just seemed like the thing to do. I guess I hoped that other developers would find it useful and contribute bug fixes. That largely hasn't happened, so I'm mostly just focused on building the day job project for now. Once I get the next milestone done, I'll consider working on more features for Calla, but for now I need to pay the bills.

[0] WebXR today still kind of is, but it's a lot better than it used to be and I think some clever design in UX with something akin to 2-factor auth can help get around it.

And I have only had good experiences once we enforced _not_ using Firefox there were no problems.

'Use zoom and get screwed.'