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Comment by hmokiguess | Hacker News Reader

I don't know man, I think I am not the right audience for this. I think online meetings are fine as is, I want to spend less time on them and more time connecting in real life.

I have been working remotely for a decade now, with fully remote teams, and we never felt the need for a deeper bonding in the form of work meetings that are more casual.

That said, if we want this kind of experience, online gaming already gives us that. I see lots of members of the team hanging out by discord and in gaming platforms.

Looks cool, but I don't want it. That's just my opinion.

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We tried a "fun" virtual office tool around covid times called Gather Town, which is 2D. People liked the virtual office, but only for certain company events like hackathons or meetups. The general audience totally prefers something like slack for texting and meeting.

We also had an issue with a few people getting motion sickness from any 3D games, so any 3D virtual meeting space was out of the question for our company. A flat 2D UI would be preferable to the "low performance" option that this project provides, which is quite jarring.

The motion sickness part is interesting, never thought about that. In flat.social, you get a 3D view but it's isometric by default, not a first-person view experience.

The first person ones were definitely more motion sickness inducing, but 3rd person view also apparently causes it. There was one person for whom even the 2D game caused some sickness when panning the camera around. I was very surprised.

But what if half the group just wants to chat? I can see this working with a few people kicking a ball around while everyone else talks :)

I always wonder who the right audience is for this type of virtual environment for online meetings. And I am seriously curious because I am probably too old to relate to younger professionals these days, so I may be missing something that other may find fun.

Well, in my case I am more than glad to be missing on this fun is my point.

I think I wouldn't be able to function well in a work environment that had this kind of setup for their meetings on a regular basis, it would feel very draining to me.

I would be certainly open to it infrequently, or as an opt-in, but if the workplace moves towards this direction I know I would struggle.

Is it appealing to people who like open plan offices?

We had to use Gather during covid, as a constant presence virtual office, all day long. It was an exhausting stream of endless distractions, the spatial audio meant people would just start randomly talking to you. But unless you had it pulled up on a monitor dedicated only to it, the real experience was a background tab of disembodied voices playing through your speakers at random, it was jarring and inhumane.

HRTF spatialized audio should make your meetings shorter through more efficient communication. It's not about "bonding". For example in a traditional online meeting, it's very difficult to interrupt/interject but than can be done naturally with good spatial audio.

Most meeting software nowadays has a “queue” system which lets you put your hand up. I think that has been a perfect solution to me. In large calls you also have moderators and mute controls.

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