Ambient Co-Presence
maggieappleton.com
maggieappleton.com
This is a feature of every (non-private at least) forum, it's called the logout button :)
But the actual multiplayer is constrained. Your offers of help can be accepted by anyone. You can be periodically invaded. There's no communication other than by movement and gestures.
It does feel like the gaming equivalent of sitting alone with other people. You're aware of them, can interact if you so choose, but your experience is still your own.
There was a co-presence signal, but it had a 12-24 hour delay. It was called "the water cooler." You quickly learned what everyone else was watching and if you had picked the wrong network for that timeslots.
Ambient presence is an important goal. I’ve been running remote companies for almost 35 years and have been trying to achieve some level of this.
I’ve tried a few times to connect a couple of offices by just putting up a tablet running a chat (first Skype — that’s how long ago!) and later FaceTime. The idea is to not be spying on anyone, but showing what others would see if they were there: basically you could glance over and see if Jo was around, or basically see that Jo looks like they are really concentrating so no wonder they don’t respond to my slack. Or “look, those guys have a visit from jim’s partner!”
This is harder than it seems — the software isn’t designed to run continuously and the cameras aren’t really right.
I agree a camera on a person is almost always bad, and an involuntary camera on a person is always bad.
But what about connecting two offices? If I stand in one corner I have a very low resolution understanding of what’s going on — can’t really see any screens, just get a general gestalt of the energy level, if Bob looks like he’s concentrating etc. Maybe I’d walk over to the next room, see across the room that he’s busy, so send him email instead. I’d like that kind of thing, and that kind of thing not using a traffic light on a dashboard but something that used human senses, intuition, and affordances.
But we are far from solving this problem.
Always on camera just seems stressful and I hate the idea.
I don't have any data or even anecdotes, just these vague feelings.
Yet we do take pleasure doing things together in other domains, not always talking. Consider hiking, sailing, or building something together. Why can’t we have that same feeling while working?
See my response to the comment you were responding to for some other thoughts in this regard.
I agree that if we explode the word "reading" into everything it might be an analog for, then some of this could make more sense.
If "reading" a page on the web is supposed to be an analog of "reading a book", maybe most don't want to see others.
But if "reading" a page on the web is supposed to be an analog of "attending a lecture" or "showing up to vote" or "standing in line to buy a ticket", then "reading a book" may not be the best frame of reference :)
(I think about this stuff a lot. I lean extroverted. Maggie and I seem to be working through the same thoughts I've been picking through for the last few years, so I'm definitely a bit biased as to the wisdom of the post :)
The fact that this idea was even proposed and explored makes me think there are some common-sense principles and ground rules that are not being followed, like a first filter after brainstorming new digital experiences. For example, hmm, brainstorming here, part of working in the same room as other people is you can hear their phones buzzing when they get texts. What if we made an app that gets notified when one of your friends' phones buzzes, for any reason, and it makes your phone buzz at a lower volume, so it's more like you're in the same room even if you are on the other side of the world? No, that is a bad idea because it would just be annoying and distracting.
One should ask, under what circumstances do people currently read the same thing at the same time, in each other's presence? What creates a feeling of presence in this case? What makes the experience feel better or worse? Do we even care what strangers are reading? In a meeting, people are usually reading on their own screens or pages, or one person reads to another or to the group. There are situations like reading the same sign at a museum exhibit or art gallery, where there is presence with a stranger (which may or may not even be a positive thing). I think the first thing my brain needs to know is how many people are standing around next to me. Reddit threads have a little indicator that says something like "17 people here." To have a blurry cursor blob suddenly moving across my screen without an indication of how many people are "here" is disorienting. That doesn't happen in real life unless someone is out of sight playing with a laser pointer or flashlight, or there's a sniper.
I really would hope this would be 101-level thinking for this field.
I've worked at workplaces that had a video "portal" between two office locations, and that worked fine, if you could choose whether you want to work in view of the camera.
I don't know if I agree with that. You can follow someone's gaze fairly easily. At a train stop, you can see if they're reading the map, watching birds or what have you. You can tell if someone is looking at something that interests you as well.
Has anyone figured out a nice way to do the partykit-like cursor stuff [0] that doesn't need a database/intermediary? It would be so nice to be able to ship a p2p presence-enabled static site without a dedicated server. Looks like partykit has a generous free tier but we all know those only last so long.
Oh and while I'm here I'll plug my friend's project that this reminded me of! StreetPass is a browser extension that helps you find your people on Mastodon by checking for social metadata tags on the sites you visit [1].
edit: This is server-mediated. For true P2P you could use WebRTC.
Alternatively, it'd be interesting (albeit again difficult and confining too) to have 2 or 3 folks working on the same desktop. Get a 8k 85 inch TV, with a long desk in front of it, and set it up with multi-pointer-x or some such, and let everyone work on the same shared surface.
Good write-up. Hypothesis is one of the greatest damned tools on the net; I wish we saw this stuff getting traction & iterated on, saw it rising. It feels like it afforda so much more to us than anything else people have done.
If someone does want help, then heck yeah, the same shared code-environment should help co-coding too! But I think the leap, for me, is trying to imagine staying connected, rather than everyone being siloed; ambient co-presence puts it nicely.
Just a bit over a week ago I was pair coding with a coworker over a live share VS Code session for an hour or so when I suddenly realized that they must have been talking the whole time and I couldn't hear them (which turned out to be an audio issue on my end). We had apparently gone from "both of us talking and hearing fine while pair coding on the same set of files" to "I could speak but not hear him and only see his cursor and typing, and even then only if I was looking at the same place as him at the same time". Part of why we were actually able to be somewhat productive for the period of time since I had lost audio (maybe half an hour or so?) was that he was non-verbally communicating incredibly well just with his editing; I might be writing a line of code, and then suddenly I'd see that he paused what he was doing and highlighted some other line, and I'd look and say "Oh! Good catch, I forgot to take into account <something related to the line of code he highlighted".
I suspect that having something like a live share session that I was using but sitting everyone in the same room would honestly give the same or better results; I think you're on to something that this sort of social interaction in the same room could be incredibly interesting for everyone involved, but I'm not convinced that you need any sort of special virtual working space with avatars _or_ a giant monitor for everyone to be on at the same time. Honestly, thinking about this is already giving me some ideas for hackathon-type stuff where collaboration can be encouraged by having a team share exactly one copy of the repository to all work on at once rather than everyone going off in to their silos and working on separate components.
A lot less safe, but a lot more fun.
That is, if I was able to "hang out" in the same vicinity as e.g. Cory Doctorow, Bill Gates, < insert your favorite blogger / influencer here > and weed out low effort content.
I'd much rather read articles vetted by people I consider to have good critical thinking skills.
[1] https://djyresearch.com/2021/03/30/details-bilibili-and-bull...