eambutu

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 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!

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!!

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.

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

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?

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...

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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...

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.

Love the initiative! There has been really awesome work by OpenAI and Deepmind recently in OpenAI/AlphaStar, but I find it all pretty impractical until people figure out how to train those models without thousands of GPU's over weeks. IMO, it's either huge breakthroughs in simulations, or sample-efficient RL.