Launch HN: Gather.Town (YC S19) – Spatial video chat for remote teams | Hacker News Reader

Launch HN: Gather.Town (YC S19) – Spatial video chat for remote teams

gather.town

311 pointseambutu161 comments

Hey HN!

I'm Phillip, cofounder of Gather https://gather.town/?ref=hn. We are a video-chat platform that creates virtual spaces for offices, conferences, events, and social. You walk around on a 2D map, and see / hear the people near you.

We started more a year and a half ago, on telepresence for your closest friends and family. We explored all sorts of technologies like custom wristwatches, tablet apps, tele-operated robots, and VR. We were in the middle of one of our VR experiments when COVID hit, and we decided to switch focuses on the pressing needs of people today.

We had an idea for how people could gather better online, generally. Some of you may have seen our HN post launching Online Town half a year ago, and since then, we've hosted 1000+ paid spaces across conferences, offices, weddings, parties, magic conventions, universities, and much more!

Many "real-life" interactions translate easily into Gather. For large gatherings, people will split off into separate groups to talk, and walk between the conversations by just moving their avatar around. For remote teams, you can walk up to a coworker's desk to ask them a quick question, or notice a group of people congregating at the water cooler and go join them.

(Our own team works out of a Gather office--most of our team has actually never met each other in person)

What's unique about us is how much you can customize your own space. Our tools let you design any layout or style that you want, so many of our users replicate their real life offices and community spaces. We also have embedded objects you can put in your space. For example, you can work at a whiteboard, watch Youtube/Twitch videos together, or play games with other people in your space.

Right now, we're offering one month trials for office spaces, as well as setting up custom office layouts for teams, for free!

Come check it out and meet us in the space we made for HN: https://gather.town/?ref=hn ! We'd love to hear your feedback.

I've used Gather for several conferences, and I've found it to be surprisingly effective at recreating some of the benefits of in-person gatherings.

In particular, since there's no formalism around creating or scheduling meetings, it makes it extremely easy to walk up to people you know, chat for a few seconds, and then step away. Or for impromptu meetings to break out, where two people are chatting, and then another person joins, and soon there are 5-10 people in a larger discussion.

What it hasn't been able to resolve (at least for me) is the awkwardness of starting conversations with strangers. This is already awkward enough in person, where you kind of have to edge your way in to an existing conversation and wait for a lull to join in. Starting a cold 1-on-1 without reading body language is just not possible for me.

Remotely, there's no way to get over the step function of "in the conversation" where your face just pops up. For me, that lack of a gradient makes it very difficult to break the ice when meeting new people.

I think the physicality of Gather does help a bit, because (for example) you might sit at a "let's talk" table to indicate you're open to meeting new people, but that still basically translates to "extroverts go here". I'm not sure how to solve it long term, but I think tools like there are definitely a step in the right direction.

You bring up a really point here, and it's something we haven't spent nearly enough time on. What are the kinds of body language that you think are really important in real life, that make it easy to break into a conversation?

I have a suggestion to make on this regard, not related to body language.

In scientific conferences, typically at the end of the day (e.g. after dinner, with drinks) you have "poster presentations". These presentations look pretty much like these images from Google [0]. Everyone goes to a big room, and the presenters stand in front of their posters which are ~90x120cm. People walk around looking at the poster titles figures, and when one of them catches their interest they stop to listen to the presenter (if they are already taking to a group) or ask him about it.

The fact that you have these big posters at all ends up being just a cue so people can identify who is working on which kinds of subjects/projects, and go talk to them about it. My advisor had this really funny idea of having "microposters" at a conference, where he just taped an A4 paper with one figure and the project title and his name to his back, and that is all it took to start conferences. It worked super great, it was exactly what it took to "break the ice".

In these conferences people will typically have read your papers, but they don't know your face, or even that you were in a paper (at most they will remember first author or last author, which is the professor). So just having a small cue "I'm Bob and I work on X" is already sufficient to break the ice.

My suggestion would be two things: 1) For mimicking the poster presentation aspect of scientific, to allow people to upload an image which gets displayed on an area of the map. Then the presenter can stand there, and interested folks just gather around him to listen.

2) Allow some kind of mouseover view that shows additional information about the person, eg a bio, a description of the projects, or a picture/link to a description of the projects.

I haven't yet seen a good virtual scientific conference, and it is exactly this aspect of the social interactions that is missing. In the end of the day, the primary reason why scientists move halfway around the globe to gather in a hotel for a few days is not to so much to listen to the speakers as it is to gather in small groups at breakfast/lunch/dinner/happy hour/breaks, and exchange ideas and get to know each other. Academic conferences allow people to put a face to the names they see in papers, and it really helps make science feel more humane and prompts you to exchange more.

Thanks!

[0]https://www.google.com/search?q=scientific%20poster%20presen...

Yes. This, this, and more this. Basically, having a way to see someone's table or booth could work for scientific conferences or trade shows or many different conferences, and also for informal conversations as well. I would love this feature.

#1 is already supported. Gather actually has a poster object for this purpose. You might want to check out the conference demos.

As another commenter mentioned, we support this already! It was one of the first features we built, because our first paid customers were academic conferences. You can check it out here: https://gather.town/app/p4B9DUqB8NAazd3t/DemoConference

Let people pick an emoji that represents their current mood. Bonus points if you import all Discord gifs.

Emojis are the body language of the web.

Remember accessibility. The avatars are already quite small. I'd suggest something obvious like you could highlight yourself green or wear a green hat if you want to talk. You don't need to imitate real life - leverage the fact that you can manifest obvious queues in the digital world. If only we could make instantly make ourselves bright green in the real world when we want to meet people (sometimes people use wristbands or necklaces to do this IRL)!

That green ring sounds cool. Conference groups, where one tries to enter a group, but doesn't know anyone in it, are one the biggest challenges of a conference. If you could simulate open shoulders, closed shoulders, that would be a way to make this, better than reality. If everyone in a group has closed shoulders, it appears obvious they are not interested in anyone new joining. And also as in real life, a more welcoming group will stand slightly differently, but a newcomer can feel the difference. A slight opening of the shoulders in the group circle, allows one to enter, without feeling rude. Simulating that feeling, by making a switch, sign, or setting, may be a breakthrough? Very exciting program. Going to try soon.

I like the idea of having some sort of easy-to-see marking. The specific realization in terms of a green hat might be non-optimal, because green hats have an unfortunate symbolism in Chinese culture.

Broadcast audio further than video. Make it easy to find a break in conversation.

I had the same thought in my use of Gather and I think there are (at least) two separate scenarios.

One is when someone is alone. Are they actually still physically present? Are they waiting for someone? In person, I can see if someone is actively scanning the room and appear open to a conversation.

The second is when a group of people are already engaged in a conversation. Are they discussing something a bit more private? Are they speaking my language? Do they appear open to having more people join the conversation. In real life, I can hear parts of a conversation from a distance and look at how those in the conversation are positioning their bodies relative to one another to make some judgements on this.

You've got to implement smooth-movement. I used it for a few minutes and I'm nauseous.

Just lerp from one-square to another over 120ms and ... scratch that, if I had implemented as nice a product as yours, I would just implement click-to-move. So your character smoothly moves to where you clicked (with a touch of A* path-finding).

Only gamer's understand WASD, everyone understand's clicking.

We actually have that in development! Here is what it looks like, one one of our development branches: https://alex.gather.town/app/nO9uzqf6ZhzsXJ68/Grand%20Centra...

I managed to get to Gather's office and what blew my mind is that there are programmatic gates that allow people to go into private spaces if they have permission.

Many more such interactions coming soon!

P.S. this is an awesome space on of our users made: https://gather.town/app/qBA0zkP9HTQxpqpB/inception . This one blew my mind!!

I like this, as it keeps the background the same and only moves the person. I find it less dizzying as such.

Opened the link in Firefox and got a message "...use chrome". I find that not only unacceptable, but also bad practice.

Are you on android? Android phones don't allow WebRTC video chat to work on any browser except chrome, so it's unfortunately out of our control :( we support FF on web though!

Can you expand more on "Android phones don't allow WebRTC video chat to work on any browser except Chrome?"

My brief research[0] would indicate that WebRTC is indeed supported on FF Mobile and has been supported since 2013[1].

[0]: https://caniuse.com/?search=webrtc

[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/09/17/webrtc-now-availabl...

Firefox dropped H264 support 1 year ago because of Google Play Store policies. This codec was required for interacting with iOS devices which did not have VP8. However, VP8 has been added since iOS 12.1, so it might be possible to use it now across all platforms.

- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1548679

- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Rel...

While Firefox had to drop support for OpenH264 on Android, because of Google's Play Store policies. It is not true that only Chrome supports H264 on Android. Firefox switched to the Android platform encoder and decoder. So H264 work fine in recent versions of Firefox.

That's a good start. You've got the normal jitter bug where if you double tab you can cause it to start the next lerp early.

As a game-dev I'd recommend storing position as two variables on the client. One where the user is in the server's memory, and one where the user is locally. Smoothly move the player locally to match the server and scale it exponentially the further off the two are. I'm pretty happy to chat through this if you'd like to?

If you get smooth-move right I'll happily sing your app from the roof-tops at work and with family.

I really like the idea! Two small suggestions:

- Have an option to start camera/mic turned off, and make it clear that your camera feed will be visible to people you approach. My own camera view and mic (and the option to turn them off) are also kind of easy to miss on my 27" screen.

- If I press and hold, say, S and then tap D, the avatar starts moving right and doesn't stop moving right until I release S. I'd expect it to continue moving downward when I release D.

Thanks for the feedback + bug report! I agree that we should do better on making the camera settings more clear.

My boss got excited about this a few weeks back, but none of the rest of the office wanted to really use it (and we had some issues with video/audio feeds). I don't really get the idea: what problem does this solve that Slack/Zoom/etc don't? The whiteboard seems OK but no software can solve the problem that drawing with a touchpad sucks. Am I going to have to schedule meeting rooms again? Forget finding the right Zoom link, I now have to find the right room too? Stand around the water cooler when I'm on a break, except that then I won't be at my computer and so I can't actually use that? It's easy to talk to coworkers, but Slack is even easier. It's easy to start a meeting, but Zoom is no harder - and easier for people outside your organization. "How's the cafeteria?" is what one of my coworkers asked, jokingly, but I think that captures my feeling of it. Sure it's got a cafeteria, but that cafeteria doesn't solve any of the problems that a real cafeteria solves.

Then again, I'm also of the opinion that video calls provide little value beyond phone calls, so maybe I'm just a grump.

Look at the pricing model, this doesn't look like it's trying to replace any of those things.

It looks like you'd rent it out for an event or such. I can see that it would be a bit of a fun - if we're all on video / phone chats all day & we need to do a 'virtual offsite' it would be good to change the environment a little.

I can see this being useful for the occasional planning day etc.

I have no idea why they highlight the $2/user/8 hours when they also offer $7/user/month. The latter makes it clear that you could use this all day, every day.

Ah, good point. This is an artifact of the 8-hour block pricing being the first pricing we ever offered, but monthly is definitely more what we're focusing on.

A big benefit, especially with more people, is that it's relatively painless and socially natural to break out into multiple small discussions (as might happen at say, a coffee meeting irl). The awkwardness of 12-person video calls is extremely painful in other software.

If you read the founders comment, they mention a lot of other use cases in addition to offices/work.

I would probably really dislike using this with coworkers or for "in the office." But I can imagine it being a good fit with some of the other, more social use cases.

Yeah other uses seem more plausible. My boss wanted to use it as a virtual office, where he sits at his desk and us at our cubicles, that kind of thing.

Could you elaborate more on why you would dislike using this to be "in the office"? Thanks for the feedback, this is very helpful.

I had to think about it a bit, but I think in the end it's probably due to a couple bad experiences at startups. There's a lot of toxic, authoritarian company cultures out there that hide behind the idea that in order to be a good coworker you need to upbeat, peppy, and thrilled to be working at all times. It seems to go hand in hand with the (usually toxic and exploitative) work hard/play hard mentality.

If I were required to use this at work, I would instantly view it as a yellow/red flag that management is starting to get heavy handed about team culture, and I would probably start resenting it.

My ideal company culture is pretty minimal at this point: friendly people, a healthy work/life balance, and coworkers who are open to/good at learning - because that's what I strive for myself.

I'm probably coming off as a curmudgeon, and like I said maybe it's just due to some bad associations that come to mind, but this seems like it's starting down the path of "look how much fun our employees have at work!" My $.02.

That being said I wish you luck, and it seems like a neat option for more social settings.

I second this, if you’re looking for feedback specifically on why it may not be welcome “in the office”

That being said, I love the concept and think it can make for some interesting online social events!

Thanks for the really thoughtful feedback. I definitely hear this, and I think it would be crazy for us to think that we can build a single tool that will be useful across all ranges of team dynamics and culture.

FWIW, just like how companies can have different cultures around their physical spaces, they could have different practices/expectations set around the virtual space. For example, if there is now an expectation for people to be in the Gather office all the time, that seems like an issue with the company (and you could expect them to do other unpleasant things like, expect you to respond to Slack messages at 10 PM).

Another q would be: under the current paradigm, are you enjoying work from home more than physical offices? One of our goals here is to replicate the physical ones, so maybe this is just not directionally correct for you.

I also admit that I haven't had any of the particular experiences mention, so maybe I'm talking out of my sphere of knowledge here.

>FWIW, just like how companies can have different cultures around their physical spaces, they could have different practices/expectations set around the virtual space.

That's true, and it's not like I would quit my job if my team started using this, so maybe I would come around and appreciate it more. But initial gut reaction brings negative thoughts.

>Another q would be: under the current paradigm, are you enjoying work from home more than physical offices?

There are pros and cons for sure. I actually just transferred to a wfh permanent employee (although last time I was in an office was April), which I see as a net positive mostly due to how much time I save not commuting.

What our office spaces recreate are all the interactions you would get throughout the day, that are not just scheduled meetings. Our team uses it to work alongside each other, and you can easily drop by someone's desk to ask a quick question or talk as you're walking out of a meeting. After work, you might notice a group playing games in our arcade and join them.

You can see what our own office looks like here: https://staging.gather.town/app/oxrhEtb3sV7VutbQ/GatherOffic...

The problem that we've heard a bunch is that people feel disconnected from their coworkers, because you don't really get to interact with them socially anymore. Would love to get your thoughts--do you not feel like you have this problem, or do you think gather.town doesn't solve this?

Tangenetially related, but check out Kaptivo Solo. It's (currently) free and does a great job of enhancing video of you writing a real physical whiteboard so it can actually be read on video calls. Of course, this requires you to have a physical whiteboard, but since I'm attending a lot of meetings in my office, I am fortunate to have one opposite my desk and it works great.

https://support.kaptivo.com/hc/en-us/categories/360001386698...

I think this is more geared towards orgs that are not really remote. They're just replicating the office environment online.

In order for this to work I'd have to work all day with a camera on my face, if I understood this correctly. This sounds awful to me.

I do think this would be really cool/fun for events, but for day-to-day work, I'd absolutely hate it.

> In order for this to work I'd have to work all day with a camera on my face, if I understood this correctly. This sounds awful to me.

Yeah I wasn't sure, is that what they're suggesting as the use-case? Always-on video and mic sounds awful, even if most of the time no one sees it. My home is not my office, my "home office" is just a desk in my living room and I share this space. So opening a window to my home is, frankly, unwelcome.

One of the most important features here for work is actually explicitly not doing always-on camera/mic. We have a setting that makes it so that when you're not looking at the tab, no one can see/hear you, but other people can come up to you and "tap on your shoulder". If you do decide to engage with them, it's super frictionless.

I'm cautiously bearish on this type of idea -- the virtualized "2D physical space."

I think it could work in virtual reality with Facebooks' emotive expressions, face tracking, etc. But if I'm in the middle of a workday, moving a little 2d character around doesn't feel very useful. But perhaps I'm wrong!

If this type of idea does actually get strong PM fit, the market size could be huge. So for VCs it seems like an interesting bet to make, even if the odds of success are low.

Congratulations on the launch! Thoughts on competitors like Gatherly?

https://www.gatherly.io/

And High Fidelity: https://www.highfidelity.com/

And Movement: https://www.movement.fm/spaces

And MakeSpace: https://makespace.fun/

And GroupRoom: https://grouproom.io/

And Rambly: https://rambly.app

I am super excited for https://www.huddlehq.io/

Used it for a few 1:1s and sprint plannings. I love it!

Shameless plug for my own side project: https://dj3d.io/

Wanted to say that out of all the alternatives, this seems most interesting. Is there an info or about page where I can read your approach?

I found the about page here: https://dj3d.io/about

thanks for sharing! I'm currently working on something similar so it's nice to learn about the open source projects you used to build it on your about page. Very cool project!

And (shamelessly my own): https://cyberparty.io/

And Remo: https://remo.co

This and other links look great, and more natural/simpler than the 2d board.

But gatherly doesn't seem ready to serve my family and I if I have to request info (I can't just sign up).

What's the best, simple app like this that allows easy subconversations that my family, parents, other non-technical folks could easily join?

I don't mind paying to host but it has to be easy for them to log in and use.

I run a completely free service https://firemeet.io Though I think gather's UX is actually very friendly to non-technical people!

That's cool! How is it funded?

I've engineered it to be very inexpensive to run. I work on high efficiency video codecs, so one benefit is that I get to sometimes test my codec's and get real user feedback.

I personally don't find virtual stuff fun, the pandemic is really sad, so wanted to make something available for public use. :)

hi revalo <3 miss you hope the other coast is treating you well

miss you too fam <3

You should try Remo https://remo.co It’s very easy to branch out into sub conversations and targeted at non technical folks.

I think all the competitors show that there's a huge need right now, but I don't think anyone's quite got it yet. We're currently far ahead in terms of reliability (used for hundreds of paid events every month) and the level to which you can flesh out your environments, but I'm excited to see what the landscape looks like over the next year!

One I'm personally a huge fan of is Mozilla Hubs (https://hubs.mozilla.com/), which is 3D and VR compatible. It's not accessible enough to people today, but it's very, very impressive!

Check out Topia! https://topia.io

We've used Gather for a few company events and it's been super helpful for recreating as much of an in-person interaction style as possible. It outshines Zoom when you have more than 10 people in the same meeting and in more casual settings. Especially for office cultures that were heavily in-person like ours, it helps bolster the sense of team and collaboration that isn't the same over Slack/Zoom.

This super cool!! And very similar to the ideal online meetings should be for me. I even made a video to describe this online interaction problem.

https://youtu.be/q6zM1wn0dTs

Good to see someone solving this hard problem!

I've never seen someone publish something that way, (in a video with storyboard art visuals) I think it was a really effective way to demonstrate the issue and your idea.

Haha thanks! It took me some time to make that anime. I didn't get too much traction when publishing it. Good to know someone likes it!

What's your background? Why are you interested in this problem space?

I think RSA Animate [1] is where I came across it first, and I agree it's a really neat way of explaining things. Looks like a lot of work too.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL39BF9545D740ECFF

(My opinion should be taken with a grain of salt because I am a grumpy, antisocial basement dweller) We tried something like this at my work. The few days it was happening were some of my least productive in a while. Doing work while having a live camera pointed at my face all day made me nervous and unable to have deep thoughts. On top of that, there was constant noise coming from my headphones of other people's conversations.

My immediate response was to shut off my camera and drag my icon all the way to the corner of the screen so I can work alone. If the goal is to reproduce the distracting nature of the open office, I gotta say projects like this are a huge success. Also, streaming live video all day every day for no reason seems like a waste of resources on all parts.

I can see how this would be a cool tool for normal social events like parties and conferences though! Just not every day work please.

This is awesome! Love the idea of builder mode being integrated with regular game mode, like Minecraft.

I'm not sure what you guys are using for the engine, but the primary feedback I have is that it feels too sluggish. For a second-home virtual space, it'd need to feel really good moving around in it.

Right now on my 2019 Macbook, in a one person blank room, I have frame rate drops moving around where my character will skip spaces. And in the HN room going to a different place (e.g. to swimming pool), I was walking around in darkness for 5 seconds about to exit thinking there was a bug before it finally rendered. Would recommend you guys really nail constant FPS as a priority.

Thanks for the feedback. Do you have a sense for if this could be network related vs. CPU related? (was your computer fan going off, or is your internet connection spotty?). I agree this is a huge hit to user experience.

I've only briefly tried out gather.town vs rambly.app and I can say that I am partial to the later because it feels much more snappy.

I have used gather.town briefly while attending a symposium. While some of the mechanics are complicated and take time getting used to, it was definitely an interesting experience and unique experience for attending posters in a symposium. However, I am not so sure if it provides much extra benefit than a traditional conference website with posters and social events hosted on Zoom (ex: ICML2020 was nicely set up).

Facebook is hosting a networking event for PyTorch Developer Day through gather.town so I am interested to see how that goes. Maybe I will see if gather.town is indeed significantly better for a social event vs. attending posters.

It's funny you mention ICML. After attending a smaller conference that used Gather.Town extensively for their poster session, I strongly believe ICML 2020 made the wrong decision in not trying it (outside of the sparsely populated social area/games room they had).

More specifically:

1. First off, the other conference took advantage of Gather.Town's full functionality! This included not only proper poster displays, but also sponsor screens with video embeds, virtual booths with actual humans milling about and an easy-to-navigate floorplan reminiscent of a real poster hall (numbers and all). At ICML, most of us were juggling multiple Zoom links and often forgot to or neglected viewing certain presentations because it took much effort to keep up.

2. In the same vein, ICML's poster session had none of the discoverability or ease of browsing of a physical poster gallery. You couldn't just walk past a poster, notice a crowd asking questions and pop by to listen in for a bit. The somewhat non-deterministic sorting/filtering functionality on the talks list page didn't help either. I saw a number of presenters awkwardly asking idle attendees if they had any questions, as well as folks waiting for a no-show presenter that had probably logged on for 10 minutes, seen an empty room and left the call. Gather.Town mitigates these phenomena by replicating some of the physical signals/affordances of a physical space with actual interested people around and thus makes the whole business of interacting around a poster feel more natural.

3. Post-conference, I saw many comments on Reddit and elsewhere from presenters frustrated by the lack of audience interaction and apparent appreciation/meaningful discussion for their work. It's crazy that some posters at a top-tier conference like ICML didn't get a single visitor. I think that's indicative of how poor the UX (discoverability, spatial cues, ease of browsing, etc.) was for that poster session. A platform like Gather.Town doesn't solve all of those issues, but man does it help.

I love the idea! When I tried the official demo, the thing that I immediately noticed is the jagged scrolling movement of the screen when I move around.

I understand the pixel art style (I love it btw) and that the map is actually discrete pieces of tiles instead of fluid/pixels, but it's really visually jarring as I move around. If I move by pressing arrow keys once at a time that's fine, or if I even hold down arrow in one direction that's still okay, but if I move by quickly changing directions (e.g. moving diagonally) it almost hurts my head to look at the screen while my avatar is walking.

Thanks for the feedback! This is actually something we're working on, you can see what it currently looks like on one of our development servers here: https://alex.gather.town/app/nO9uzqf6ZhzsXJ68/Grand%20Centra...

Am I the only one who immediately thought of this episode of community (Digital Estate Planning)?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 1fgR7oeIXFA

You are definitely not

HAHA this looks very relevant! I gotta give it a watch sometime soon.

Ive been using this since your post way back at the start of the lockdowns. We have a small company, 5 people, and it works great for us to meet up. Itd be cool to have some slack-like features, maybe charater bots you or vhs/answerphone you coukd record messages too for people who join later. A forest where each tree is a repo in our github and we can indicate which branch we are on. Also being able to emote /dance etc and consumable status items would be cool. I guess find the balance of fun and productive ha

As soon as the furry/kink community gets a hold of this, it's going to be interesting for sure.

I've been working on a competitor to this. http://tengable.com

Additionally, you may want to check out https://www.sococo.com/ which is another competitor.

I personally think this space is going to be big as people adapt to permanently remote or fully remote.

I'm getting closer to an MVP, and am interested in finding a co-founder. I'd love to find people interested in this space!

So great to see Gather on HN! I've been following Cyrus, Philip, and Kumail for a while, and been really impressed by their work.

I've tried Gather and a few of the other competitors out there - out of all of them Gather nails the UX the most. It's pretty simple, but it's also powerful. Most of the other competitors in this space have thrown together a sloppy "business" platform, but Gather just feels much more accessible, friendly, and easy to use.

Thanks! I remember you reaching out in the early days of Online Town, good to see you again here!

I see you guys are using p2p webrtc, and it looks like there is there no media router? Because webrtc can't do a 3-way handshake, traffic will be N^2 as more people join a conversation. Why didn't you guys use a server-side Selective Forwarding Unit or Multipoint Conferencing Unit architecture?

Hey there, thanks for checking us out! We actually are using an SFU architecture instead of P2P :)

Ok yeah that makes more sense, thanks for the reply.

Btw here's the doc of yours that said it was p2p, I guess it's outdated. Might be good to remove or update it. It was publicly accessible within the demo instance linked in this thread, as an asset in the "sponsor" room.

- Document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vR8RTTH8Dr1KwiWE...

Under platform overview: "Stack Video is streamed peer-to-peer via WebRTC. Uses Firebase (Google cloud storage) for the database Works on Chrome / Firefox, and on any laptop or computer. Tablets and mobile not supported yet."

Oh man, thanks for pointing this out. I feel like we got an email once every month asking about something p2p, and was always confused why people kept getting this impression.

Nice ! It looks like it's definitely not easy to engage conversation with strangers.

I tried it for 20minutes and wanted to connect to random people, but noone seems like they wanted to talk ! they just walk away (and going after them looked like harassment ).

I've used online.town before, and it's awesome to see that it's productized now with a lot of the features I wished. We used if for company gatherings and played games like hide and seek, and as a way to network with new people. The fact that things like podiums can now project voices, games are included, really make this so much more appealing. It's just a fun way to connect with people. Including random people. And you don't need many conversation starters, other than "cool platform right, want to go checkout the ...". So excited for this!

Thanks! We've been working very hard, and it's come a long way since then :)

Aww man, I've been ideating around this exact idea for MSFT teams for a while now. (not like I had any time or buy-in for it) BRILLIANT. There is always a faint sense of jealousy and vindication when I see an idea being executed so close to what a person has been pushing for.

Congrats ! I think you're onto something.

I would readily pay for this if I could get my entire team to adopt it. (which I'd say is nearly impossible)

I might sound like making a deal with the devil, but if you could integrate your service into MSFT teams, you might be able to get a huge user-base quite fast.

I'm curious what you mean by this. Does Teams provide an API for building WebRTC apps?

Thanks so much! Curious why you think it would be nearly impossible to get your team on it?

partly because I work for a large company that is deeply integrated with MSFT teams. Also, at that size, we don't usually have such team level autonomy. Lastly, they don't want us routing any information through a 3rd party. Confidentiality and security is critical.

In general, mature teams do not adopt entirely new communication styles just because they are better. It usually takes something that is either revolutionary (eg: when Slack first got popular as a move away from email). Or, it is a seamless addition to what they already have and doesn't rock the ship.

I tried this out a few months ago and enjoyed using it. I love the idea of bringing the experience of in-person interactions to an online platform. I hope we'll be seeing more of this in the future.

I hopped into the common space and was delighted to have a real, spontaneous conversation with an actual human! That's the first time that's happened to me ANYWHERE during COVID.

Hey Phillip, congrats on hitting the front page on HN.

Been using Gather.town at RecSys conference, and that was very exiting. I love the mechanics and UX, it reminds me Pokémon FireRed on GameBoy.

Just out of curiosity, how is your retention is doing? I understand, you probably has very heterogeneous users – some of them purchase one-time per-seat plan, some of them use it as an office replacement, but though. My concern is how this 8-bit mechanics works in the long-term.If you can shed some lights on that, would be cool.

I used gather as part of a social gathering with my university cohort and enjoyed it. Only oddity for me was one situation where a group of 3 of us had the person in the 'middle' hearing both, but the two on the outside could only hear or see the middle person. We tried expanding the 'circle range' thingy but then could hear the conversation happening across the room. I wish there was some way to make that whole process slightly more fluid.

Was there a reason that, in this case, you couldn't all walk closer to each other? We additionally have "private spaces" you can set up so that everyone in that area can see/hear each other: https://gather.town/features#feature-private-spaces . People often use this so that they can sit down on chairs and talk to only the other people at the table.

We were already maxed out on closeness:

X-

was the arrangement if I recall. I think the spaces thing would work well but sounds like it could remove some of the fluidity of meeting anywhere, bumping into people in the 'hallway', etc.

Any "teachers" / "educators" in here who have the flexibility to experiment:

- What tools have you used successfully? For what number of people concurrently?

This is fantastic! Good to see you're gaining traction here. I've 2 questions for you:

1/ What's your strategy to standout from the pool of virtual event tools?

2/ Are you keen on being interviewed on https://virtualmojito.com/ - It would be awesome to showcase your stories.

I can be reached on Twitter. Let's chat!

Amazing! But you gotta add some bully protection! I just chased some hapless individual named 'hn' all around the place...

For remote teams, I literally just want Slack but with named voice channels visible to everyone in the sidebar for discoverability.

It sounds like you want Discord.

It is quite staggering how Discord don't have a business plan yet.

Makes me think there must be something up with their security, I can't think of any other reason why they wouldn't give private paid plans for businesses.

There are a LOT of people who would jump over from slack.

Well.. They kinda do With Nitro and a properly configured server, it makes a damn fine slack replacement

If Discord had the possibility of Slack's channel system (everyone can create one, you choose which ones to join) then it'd be perfect.

For a very small remote organization, Discord would definitely be my go-to choice to start with, but privacy concerns and the fact that it stops working well with more people involved would eventually be a blocker.

Hey, my team and I were inspired by this exact use case and have been building something on our own. If you're interested please shoot me an email at xzhao254[at]gmail I would love to get your thoughts on it and maybe have you try it out.

Try https://tandem.chat/

Used Tandem, it sucked. The app is 250mb of Electron and it shows. I’ve never used something so simple with such a sluggish interface.

It was also really bad for privacy. You have to opt out of “automatically share window titles with everyone”, and Do-Not-Disturb still pops up notifications when people ignore the badge.

This sounds really neat. Analoging the reality into a virtual one with higher fidelity. I’m thinking about coming over from the other end (like thinking from first principles). Like what it means to be remote workplace? Why do we hangout at a workplace ? Etc I’m sure you folks would have thought about it a lot. I would love to see your conclusions.

Oh interesting, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Right now I'd say we're still in this "skewmorphic transition," where we gain a lot from just replicating more aspects of real life, and since it analogizes very easily people know what to do with it. As things become more mature and people become situated with it, we'll definitely be asking how we can break physical constraints and if there's a fundamentally better arrangement.

I actually haven’t thought deeply about this topic yet.

I think it’s a tricky to judge whether re-inventing the wheel is important and would yield better results or one should just stick with the norms.

And I genuinely believe that we definitely need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to workplaces. Trying to translate a physical workplace to a digital one seems logical but doesn’t feel right. And more importantly, if you come from that side, it surely makes the transition easier for people, but makes it very hard to re-invent the wheel because your lens (how you look at the problem) is now biased.

But then how do you re-invent the wheel?

I think one way is to just question everything and see if the past conclusions still hold true in this new reality. Once you have enough conclusions, you can maybe begin to think about how to model a solution with those conclusions in mind. Makes sense ?

I see! I think another angle, is to first create a virtual analog of a workplace, but then since it's virtual, it's super flexible and easy to experiment with. I think there's only so far you can get with these questions, off reasoning alone.

Another example of a project I worked on, which was similar, was this VR office: https://siemprecollective.com/vr.html . We basically made a one-to-one mapping of our physical office in VR, and the idea was after we had that, we could play around and tweak things very easily. And actually being able to TRY these new experiments was the whole point.

Are all of your assets original? The avatars look very suspiciously like the overland trainer sprites from Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire. When I was a kid I made “custom” Pokemon trainer sprites for fun and these look like something I would have made; just take a sprite sheet from spriters resource and edit away...

All the avatars and assets are original, though I concede that there is an avatar that looks like the pokemon trainer (and you're not the only one who's pointed this out :P)

If I could get better music support, that'd be a killer feature. A coworker and I immediately looked for a spotify or other music option and didn't find one. We resorted to placing TVs with really long youtube URLs, and synchronized so they auto-start when you're near.

Great to see gather.town on HN -- I really love the entire UX of being in this type of 2D virtual environment. Wonder what kind of traction this could get with educators as a Zoom alternative to help students have more of an engaging "physical classroom" feel

I see that GopherCon is using your service this year. This should be fun. Best wishes.

I love this idea, but I think that VR actually has a great opportunity here. Basically a professional (or less anime VRchat) would be great for remote conferences and workplaces once vr headsets come even further down in price.

Phillip - would you be open to using your platform for a non-profit art project? We don’t have many funds (see: COVID), but we are REALLY excited by the possibilities of the space you designed and the game maker map!! :)

Yup! Feel free to email us at hello@gather.town , and provide these details, and we'll figure something out.

Hi! I am not the OP, but just emailed you about a free online event I am organizing (Flutter Vikings).

Looks a lot like https://branch.gg/

Has anyone here tried both? I personally like the style of Branch a lot more, and movement seemed a lot smoother.

i like gather.town. a totally frivolous suggestion i would make is that it should be possible to pick up and eat the coffee and cookies. you could have a meaningless status effect of some kind.

We're thinking of doing something like this for our team, so people can drink virtual water next to the virtual water cooler. Or, you could go to the bar and buy a drink for a friend!

We tried this out for a few social events. It worked pretty well, but the choppy world movement makes me a little sick. :( Any chance of a smooth camera/movement option?

We're actively working on this — I actually have a prototype running on my dev server at the moment:

https://alex.gather.town/app/nO9uzqf6ZhzsXJ68/Grand%20Centra...

^^no guarantees on the stability of this server btw, I use it just to test random stuff so it might go down at any moment!

Thank you, that's so much better.

I notice I keep trying to zoom out. I see you have a mini-map feature and yet I find myself naturally trying to zoom out just a little each time.

Do you have any plans to add a zoom feature?

Great idea. We used that in our company for a while but. Bad ux of sharing screen (some objects are on top of the screen) and stability issues made is live in Zoom.

We have changed some UI issues with screenshare, and worked a ton on stability, so it might be worth another try! Thanks for the feedback too--it's very helpful for us to know where we might be losing people.

Isn’t this a knockoff of something posted earlier this year?

There are about half a dozen different, similar apps that all came out around the same time (I have one as well). I've done a lot of research on all of them and none of them are copies of any of the others. They all have pretty unique implementations.

Can you post a list of them?

I don't think that's really fair to do in someone else's Launch HN. Hence I didn't even link to my own app.

Another cofounder of Gather here -- I'm totally okay with you posting your app here (Calla right?) or the whole list. I think the hackernews comment readers would benefit from seeing the wider space of takes on this idea.

The half-dozen that I had researched that all came out around the same time:

  - https://calla.chat (my own, though I don't run it as a service, it's a component of my project at work)
  - https://mixaba.com
  - https://sococo.com
  - https://spatial.chat (which looks like a 2D version of Spatial.IO)
  - https://highfidelity.com (a 2D pivot for what was originally a VR project from one of the founders of Second Life)
  - https://hubs.mozilla.com

I'm missing one or two as I noticed that the main variation in total features could be covered with only a few of the ones I've listed and just stopped updating my notes doc).

Add in another half-dozen mentioned elsewhere in this thread (though I've not looked too deeply at most of them)

  - https://www.movement.fm/spaces
  - https://makespace.fun/
  - https://grouproom.io/
  - https://rambly.app/
  - https://www.huddlehq.io/
  - https://branch.gg/

These are just the ones that run in the browser. There are several more built specifically for VR (AltspaceVR, VR Chat, Spatial.IO, RecRoom, etc.), as well as some very long-running native desktop apps. 3D and spatial chat is a pretty long-running market.

Does anyone remember project wonderland? I remember doing a presentation about it at uni in 2008 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Wonderland

Yeah. Probably huddle?

We posted an early prototype of this, https://theonline.town, back in March (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22818300). As others have mentioned though, there are a ton of people building similar things.

How much funding have you raised? Would you consider crowdsourcing your next round versus just going through traditional VC?

Good question. We have made a particular point of not involving traditional VC, at least not at this current moment (and besides YC). We're currently growing off of revenue, and had raised a small amount of money from angels only.

I love the idea - in fact I expect all the big providers to follow you sometime - which is probably good and bad.

But I love it.

What are the video streaming infrastructure costs to run something like this for, say, 25 people for an hour?

Love this! The last thing you guys need is a mobile app so people can jump in even on a phone.

You can join Gather spaces from the phone browser, though it is missing features (most notably, you can't share your own video for performance reasons)

What do you mean by 'virtual spaces for social'?

People use our spaces just to hang out with each other! I've seen people recreate their own apartments and host parties, or recreate their old college dorms.

Had 3 bluescreens after starting this in Firefox today:(

I look forward to a port to Mines of Moria.

sdf

More like Gimmick.town, amirite?

Nope.

This actually seems like a really good idea, taking both the sense of place/community that you get from games, and the productivity and environment that you get at work or a conference.

I like it.

> (Our own team works out of a Gather office--most of our team has actually never met each other in person)

Yikes. As someone who's worked remotely for over a decade, I can't imagine starting a company with people I've never had a beer with.

Hey y'all, member of the engineering team here: I actually have become extremely close friends with a lot of our team members here at Gather, even though we haven't met in person — something about dropping by my coworkers' desks really makes it feel like we're together. But yeah, you really do miss out on grabbing a beer, or, for instance, knowing how tall your teammates are haha

Times are a' changing! I started a job in August and haven't physically met any of my coworkers. With a culture of 'video on during calls by default' it's actually not that bad, imo. Much better than would have been possible 10 years ago.

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