73 karma · joined October 24, 2016
Interesting, is there any reason you didn't just use your left hand for the Mute/UnMute? Was it too uncomfortable with your non-dominant untrained hand? Or did we not do a good job of communicating that the gestures work on both sides?
What martial arts do you teach if you don't mind me asking? My cofounder and I are martial arts enthusiasts (we mostly train BJJ and Muay Thai)
I've spent a lot of time thinking about pain points for traditional martial arts schools and applications of our platform. Unfortunately haven't had too many good ideas though; our platform feels more straightforwardly applicable to reducing friction and improving engagement in online group fitness classes (yoga, cardio kickboxing, etc.)
Heard on all your other points! We're going to prioritize improving the landing page and video. Thanks!
Just to clarify, by “foreground” do you mean:
1) a split screen scenario where the video conferencing window is visible but not in-focus? or
2) the video conference window is under another window / not the active tab and therefore not visible?
(1) is actually something I never registered that actually makes our platform valuable even for traditional conferencing so thanks for concretizing that!
> I'm overall less convinced by the "control by phone" flow
This is fascinating. We actually built the phone pairing feature because of some earlier feedback that the hand tracking features would be too difficult for average consumers to use. Could you possibly elaborate on why you’re less convinced by the phone pairing feature? As an engineer at heart, I’m looking for any reason to keep iterating on the cool hand tracking features :)
All your other ideas are great! Will definitely add them to our todo list
FWIW, our product roadmap is quite malleable right now and we could provide you with a room with higher time limits (+ some other cool features we've been testing) if that's at all enticing :)
Honestly blown away by all the amazing feedback / thoughts here. I was not expecting to wake up to this considering this post had 3 upvotes when I went to bed haha
Just wanted to let you know that my cofounder, Vince, and I are slowly making our way through all of the comments and hope to thank / answer most of you properly soon :)
We’d love to talk to them! If you have any contacts who’d feel comfortable talking to us and influencing where we go from here, I’d love to hear from you / them at cody@wakasaba.com
> I think the key is going to be in arriving at the right set of gestures for the right audience...
This makes sense. We’ve mostly been working with Pilates instructors, but this is a good reminder to talk to people running all types of remote fitness classes.
I’m Cody, one of the founders of WakaSaba. Traditional video conferencing platforms like Zoom assume that you’re right in front of your device. We created WakaSaba for “distance first” video conferencing and have built novel ways to interact with your room and control your device from afar:
- Hand Tracking: Turn your hands into a mouse and use it to point, select, and click. Supports basic room controls like muting / unmuting yourself and more advanced features like controlling a countdown timer that’s shown to everyone in the room
- Gesture Recognition: React to anything that happens with your hands. We capture certain hand gestures and broadcast them to everyone in a fun, engaging, and minimally(?) intrusive way
- Phone Pairing: Scan a QR code to turn your phone into a remote with access to additional controls and interactive features
Another core feature of our platform is that it’s all in the browser. We explicitly designed WakaSaba so that users wouldn’t need to download additional software or install any apps.
We originally built this for online fitness instructors, but recently have been thinking about what other industries and use cases might benefit from our technology. As a result, we’ve reoriented our landing page to focus less on “why” you might use our platform and more on “what” you can do with it. Now we want to get it in front of people to collect thoughts and general feedback.
Instructions if you want to try it out:
1) There’s a `Try a Free Room` button on our homepage
2) Clicking it will create a room that you can join / invite anyone to for 40 minutes, no email or sign up required
3) Before joining the room, there are some tutorial screens that go over our core feature set
Sorry in advance for any rough edges! We’ve deliberately prioritized getting this in front of people above all else :)
If you encounter any issues or have any questions / feedback I’m all ears! I should be around for the next couple hours.