Show HN: Pop.com – Video Calls, in 3D
pop.com
pop.com
Pop lets you have a video call in 3D, with positional audio. It works in a browser, without any download. The experience is surprisingly fresh, and the social dynamics are quite fun.
You can feel like you’re part of a group, you can see who’s looking at you, you can go to the side with someone and have a separate conversation, without interrupting the current conversation. You can share a screen that floats in space (and always faces the viewer). You can even bow to say hello!
We use Mediasoup for the WebRTC backend, Ionic/Angular for the frontend, and BabylonJS as our 3D framework.
Also, as an experiment, we’re hosting a virtual launch party at [EDIT: 6 hours later, and we're done! Thanks to everyone who came by!].
Happy to answer any questions here too, of course!
Edit: there are more screenshots here: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/pop-9
What's a space? What's going to happen if I create or join one?
Why would I want to do this?
Or is this intentional and you're soft-launching or just doing some testing?
edit: I clicked create a space and you immediately ask for access to my camera.. but there's no explanation of why you're asking for it, or what I'm getting out of it.
I feel like there are huge assumptions about users understanding what's about to happen..
And before I grant access to a remote site to my camera, I want a better idea of why I'm doing it, and what you're doing with the feed.
I won't watch a longer video just to understand what random product does.
A simple animation, a voice over, and maybe some video captures of the software would be great.
Audio is unnecessary and means I have to stop everything else I'm doing. And so does anyone else in the same room unless I can find headphones.
And 3 or 4 seconds is ample time to demonstrate that specific aspect that is hard to demonstrate with the written word.
Off topic, but your both Andy.
I watch plenty of YouTube videos but that's when I'm in a different mode. For understanding stuff I want to skim read short clear text with illustrations. Animation and video can enhance that but it shouldn't replace it.
And I never, ever want spoken voiceovers.
You only know this because you saw the HN headline.
I think it would be really helpful if you could see your own avatar.
This is not some universal rule that cannot be broken. For most startups, landing page is useful. But not always.
I like the simplicity of Pop's page.
or an even earlier version of Google, "Search Stanford" "Search the Web" https://i.imgur.com/EKiQnJX.png
They both provide more information than Pop does.
In short, you move around in the virtual space and your avatar's head is your webcam feed. There is also positional audio, so your position changes who you hear. User can also apparently spawn screen share windows in the sky.
Give it a try, it works and feel better than it looks. It is very similar to what you'd find in a VR chat application but it works surprisingly well from the browser with just the mouse.
(Completely unaffiliated, simply gave the demo a spin.)
I would put a bubble bobble clone on the domain. This is what the internet is lacking and perfect for pop.com a major tour de force of classic arcade game remakes!
If I had the money or was running a big corp looking to launch a new product, I'd pay $5-10m for it. I'll be very surprised if it was less than $3m.
- The founder previously flipped his startup Screenhero to Slack and got some cash out of that I suppose.
- Interest is negative, that money is just costing money.
- Short dictionary domains are a pretty low-risk investment, I don't know the market well but I suppose they tend to increase in price over time.
- So if the company fails he can sell it. Meanwhile it's an asset on the company's books so it's part of the valuation etc.
Sounds like this is the "second startup" version of rich-ish parents buying an apartment near college for their kid to live in, hoping to flip it for more when they graduate. Doesn't seem all too "vanity" to me, it's just combining pragmatic usefulness with an "good enough" investment opportunity.
ps. wow this app works really well!
Edit: And to be clear, I'm not even necessarily knocking that decision. Maybe an expensive TLD could make life easier for a project like this, since it could promote trust / buy-in, increasing usage at an early stage. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
However, I can say that I worked with https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ted0 who was AMAZING at helping find and acquire the domain. I can strongly recommend him as an amazing person to work with for anyone interested in buying a high-value domain.
So a few million for a domain is probably the equivalent of me spending ~$500 for a domain. Honestly not crazy at all with that perspective.
Why should I waste time clicking my mouse to move to a certain point in virtual space when no-one is really there anyways? Isn't the whole point of virtual meetings that you don't have to physically be there to attend? Walking around in the void to hear others only makes my personal experience slower and less natural.
I feel like maybe the solution here is just to have Zoom + private "rooms" for separate conversations.
(Sorry if this sounds too negative, because I always enjoy seeing new ideas and there was obviously hard work put behind this but that's my 2c)
However, I could see some value in making public chat rooms that people could join. This way 50 people join a room to talk about a particular subject and naturally split off into separate groups within the room. It would be sort of like a being at a party, where you could walk around and mingle and network with different groups of people. It would be a fun way to interact with new people, especially in current times when everyone is locked inside.
So, I see it less as a business tool, and more like VRChat (although without all the crazy avatars and games) where strangers go to socialize.
Once you get above that, there’s a variety of FOSS you can self host, like jitsi and mediasoup (what pop.com uses.) There’s also some relatively cheap paid APIs like twilio and opentok.
I had a bunch of "phantom" avatars for some reason (https://imgur.com/a/ixBGuK8)
Some thoughts:
- the idea someone just mentioned in the "launch party" about having a visualisation of an avatars audio "range" (how far they project sound) would be useful
- a visualisation that someone is speaking could also be useful (little speaker next to their name)
- definitely need some kind of password protection for joining, gate crashing would be pretty easy (unless of course you rate limit attempting to join a space to stop people brute forcing the space ID)
- ability to mute someone would also be useful in a more public setting (and the mutee should probably get a visualisation that an avatar cannot hear them)
- being able to agree with another person to go into a completely new space would also be useful way to take a conversation private
Also if you want an OSS alternative to any of these commercial tools, check out https://hubs.mozilla.com
"DOMException: The object can not be found here." - FF
and
"DOMException: Requested device not found" - Chrome
Since you state you can turn both the camera and microphone off, I think it'd be much better UX to not force camera and mic access up front.
Also, Firefox asked for permission before I clicked on the "Request Permissions" button.
Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/BKY5bcE
I've been interested in why Discord feels more natural than Zoom and so far I think it comes down to latency. As far as I know Zoom targets 150 ms, but audio-only platforms can get closer to 25-50, which can make the difference between what feels like using walkie talkies versus a real face-to-face conversation.
Any plans on how you will monetize this if it takes off?
Monetization: very similar to what everyone else in this space does. Free for social users, paid for business users, and finding a good way to segment the two.
I think Pop is interesting as a bridging solution until VR becomes the main platform for social, because it gives you more of a social presence feel than pure 2D video calls.
I'll for sure try it out in the future with calls and see how it goes. Best of luck with this!
Edit: Typos, it's bed time :D
I'm guessing the domain might have previously been used for spam or something before you bought it.
It looks like you can start the removal process here: https://oisd.nl/?p=fp
pop.com is not blocked by this blocklist
Probable causes:
- An other blocklist blocking it? - Regex? - An older version of this list contained it? > Make sure you are using the latest version.
Not sure what happened!
I ran "pihole -q -all pop.com" before commenting to see which list was blocking it and got:
> Match found in https://hosts.oisd.nl/:
> pop.com
> pop.com.sg
After reading your comment I updated my pi-hole's DNS lists, reran "pihole -q -all pop.com", and got just:
> Match found in https://hosts.oisd.nl/:
> pop.com.sg
So either your request removed it or it was removed in the time since my last list update (~9 days).
It's also on a bunch of domain blocking lists (don't have a complete list). I've submitted pop.com as a false-positive on OISD.
I wrote this elsewhere:
We bought this domain a few months ago, and you're probably right, since Gmail seems to mark our outgoing emails as spam. I'm not very well-versed in how to undo the reputation the previous owners seem to have created for the domain, so if you have any recommendations, please let me know!
That said, I checked your site against blacklists. It appears clear -
Love it
Great team as well! They helped us set it up in a way that also worked for the corporate firewall.
I believe they use Jitsi as their backend, combined with some cool engineering to make it all work on k8s.
Definitely consider creating a preset which positions the users around an object or in relation to each other when they first arrive, e.g. "conference meeting table" or "trailhead".
Another one is carefully composing the physical constraints within a space, especially when others are present. In virtual, social boundaries no longer hamper us from flying around or other behavior which can alter how a shared space feels for everyone. It may be necessary to impose rules of movement to preserve the main premise of communication.
ping -c 4 pop.com
PING pop.com (0.0.0.0): 56 data bytes
ping: sendto: Socket is not connected
ping: sendto: Socket is not connected
Request timeout for icmp_seq 0
ping: sendto: Socket is not connected
Request timeout for icmp_seq 1
ping: sendto: Socket is not connected
Request timeout for icmp_seq 2
--- pop.com ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100.0% packet lossLove the fact that it's entirely in the browser without an app too.
I am visiting a weekly XR Meetup on Thursdays and it feels a bit like going to a conference. You have someone presenting their work, with displays and people gathering in groups chatting about things.
If anyone has an issue visiting the site double check your adblock.
make sure you get taken off freely available spamlists that adblockers sync with
then if I were you I'd talk to a Google exec to speed up the domain reputation cleansing process a bit (get some articles up in your blog asap)
I worry that conferences adopting this would inaccessible, effectively be barring users who don't have the hardware to run it.
Still, super nice demo. I'd be excited to try this out for Christmas to get family on in a big room to chat.
This would work well with a physical controllable positionable telepresence device as well:
Move around in a shared real space together.
I disabled both privacy blocker extension, but no luck.
Otherwise very cool.
Our plan is to merge the two in the near future, and work on the intersection between 2D and 3D calls.
Anyway, great idea! Congrats!