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.
- Have an option to start camera/mic turned off, and make it clear that your camera feed will be visible to people you approach. My own camera view and mic (and the option to turn them off) are also kind of easy to miss on my 27" screen.
- If I press and hold, say, S and then tap D, the avatar starts moving right and doesn't stop moving right until I release S. I'd expect it to continue moving downward when I release D.
I tried this out a few months ago and enjoyed using it. I love the idea of bringing the experience of in-person interactions to an online platform. I hope we'll be seeing more of this in the future.
thanks for sharing! I'm currently working on something similar so it's nice to learn about the open source projects you used to build it on your about page. Very cool project!
I've engineered it to be very inexpensive to run. I work on high efficiency video codecs, so one benefit is that I get to sometimes test my codec's and get real user feedback.
I personally don't find virtual stuff fun, the pandemic is really sad, so wanted to make something available for public use. :)
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!
So great to see Gather on HN! I've been following Cyrus, Philip, and Kumail for a while, and been really impressed by their work.
I've tried Gather and a few of the other competitors out there - out of all of them Gather nails the UX the most. It's pretty simple, but it's also powerful. Most of the other competitors in this space have thrown together a sloppy "business" platform, but Gather just feels much more accessible, friendly, and easy to use.
Hey y'all, member of the engineering team here: I actually have become extremely close friends with a lot of our team members here at Gather, even though we haven't met in person — something about dropping by my coworkers' desks really makes it feel like we're together. But yeah, you really do miss out on grabbing a beer, or, for instance, knowing how tall your teammates are haha
Times are a' changing! I started a job in August and haven't physically met any of my coworkers. With a culture of 'video on during calls by default' it's actually not that bad, imo. Much better than would have been possible 10 years ago.
I'm cautiously bearish on this type of idea -- the virtualized "2D physical space."
I think it could work in virtual reality with Facebooks' emotive expressions, face tracking, etc. But if I'm in the middle of a workday, moving a little 2d character around doesn't feel very useful. But perhaps I'm wrong!
If this type of idea does actually get strong PM fit, the market size could be huge. So for VCs it seems like an interesting bet to make, even if the odds of success are low.
I've used Gather for several conferences, and I've found it to be surprisingly effective at recreating some of the benefits of in-person gatherings.
In particular, since there's no formalism around creating or scheduling meetings, it makes it extremely easy to walk up to people you know, chat for a few seconds, and then step away. Or for impromptu meetings to break out, where two people are chatting, and then another person joins, and soon there are 5-10 people in a larger discussion.
What it hasn't been able to resolve (at least for me) is the awkwardness of starting conversations with strangers. This is already awkward enough in person, where you kind of have to edge your way in to an existing conversation and wait for a lull to join in. Starting a cold 1-on-1 without reading body language is just not possible for me.
Remotely, there's no way to get over the step function of "in the conversation" where your face just pops up. For me, that lack of a gradient makes it very difficult to break the ice when meeting new people.
I think the physicality of Gather does help a bit, because (for example) you might sit at a "let's talk" table to indicate you're open to meeting new people, but that still basically translates to "extroverts go here". I'm not sure how to solve it long term, but I think tools like there are definitely a step in the right direction.
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?
I have a suggestion to make on this regard, not related to body language.
In scientific conferences, typically at the end of the day (e.g. after dinner, with drinks) you have "poster presentations". These presentations look pretty much like these images from Google [0]. Everyone goes to a big room, and the presenters stand in front of their posters which are ~90x120cm. People walk around looking at the poster titles figures, and when one of them catches their interest they stop to listen to the presenter (if they are already taking to a group) or ask him about it.
The fact that you have these big posters at all ends up being just a cue so people can identify who is working on which kinds of subjects/projects, and go talk to them about it. My advisor had this really funny idea of having "microposters" at a conference, where he just taped an A4 paper with one figure and the project title and his name to his back, and that is all it took to start conferences. It worked super great, it was exactly what it took to "break the ice".
In these conferences people will typically have read your papers, but they don't know your face, or even that you were in a paper (at most they will remember first author or last author, which is the professor). So just having a small cue "I'm Bob and I work on X" is already sufficient to break the ice.
My suggestion would be two things:
1) For mimicking the poster presentation aspect of scientific, to allow people to upload an image which gets displayed on an area of the map. Then the presenter can stand there, and interested folks just gather around him to listen.
2) Allow some kind of mouseover view that shows additional information about the person, eg a bio, a description of the projects, or a picture/link to a description of the projects.
I haven't yet seen a good virtual scientific conference, and it is exactly this aspect of the social interactions that is missing. In the end of the day, the primary reason why scientists move halfway around the globe to gather in a hotel for a few days is not to so much to listen to the speakers as it is to gather in small groups at breakfast/lunch/dinner/happy hour/breaks, and exchange ideas and get to know each other. Academic conferences allow people to put a face to the names they see in papers, and it really helps make science feel more humane and prompts you to exchange more.
Yes. This, this, and more this. Basically, having a way to see someone's table or booth could work for scientific conferences or trade shows or many different conferences, and also for informal conversations as well. I would love this feature.
As another commenter mentioned, we support this already! It was one of the first features we built, because our first paid customers were academic conferences. You can check it out here: https://gather.town/app/p4B9DUqB8NAazd3t/DemoConference
Remember accessibility. The avatars are already quite small. I'd suggest something obvious like you could highlight yourself green or wear a green hat if you want to talk. You don't need to imitate real life - leverage the fact that you can manifest obvious queues in the digital world. If only we could make instantly make ourselves bright green in the real world when we want to meet people (sometimes people use wristbands or necklaces to do this IRL)!
That green ring sounds cool. Conference groups, where one tries to enter a group, but doesn't know anyone in it, are one the biggest challenges of a conference.
If you could simulate open shoulders, closed shoulders, that would be a way to make this, better than reality.
If everyone in a group has closed shoulders, it appears obvious they are not interested in anyone new joining. And also as in real life, a more welcoming group will stand slightly differently, but a newcomer can feel the difference. A slight opening of the shoulders in the group circle, allows one to enter, without feeling rude.
Simulating that feeling, by making a switch, sign, or setting, may be a breakthrough? Very exciting program. Going to try soon.
I like the idea of having some sort of easy-to-see marking. The specific realization in terms of a green hat might be non-optimal, because green hats have an unfortunate symbolism in Chinese culture.
I had the same thought in my use of Gather and I think there are (at least) two separate scenarios.
One is when someone is alone. Are they actually still physically present? Are they waiting for someone? In person, I can see if someone is actively scanning the room and appear open to a conversation.
The second is when a group of people are already engaged in a conversation. Are they discussing something a bit more private? Are they speaking my language? Do they appear open to having more people join the conversation. In real life, I can hear parts of a conversation from a distance and look at how those in the conversation are positioning their bodies relative to one another to make some judgements on this.
Great idea. We used that in our company for a while but. Bad ux of sharing screen (some objects are on top of the screen) and stability issues made is live in Zoom.
We have changed some UI issues with screenshare, and worked a ton on stability, so it might be worth another try! Thanks for the feedback too--it's very helpful for us to know where we might be losing people.
This is awesome! Love the idea of builder mode being integrated with regular game mode, like Minecraft.
I'm not sure what you guys are using for the engine, but the primary feedback I have is that it feels too sluggish. For a second-home virtual space, it'd need to feel really good moving around in it.
Right now on my 2019 Macbook, in a one person blank room, I have frame rate drops moving around where my character will skip spaces. And in the HN room going to a different place (e.g. to swimming pool), I was walking around in darkness for 5 seconds about to exit thinking there was a bug before it finally rendered. Would recommend you guys really nail constant FPS as a priority.
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.
It is quite staggering how Discord don't have a business plan yet.
Makes me think there must be something up with their security, I can't think of any other reason why they wouldn't give private paid plans for businesses.
There are a LOT of people who would jump over from slack.
If Discord had the possibility of Slack's channel system (everyone can create one, you choose which ones to join) then it'd be perfect.
For a very small remote organization, Discord would definitely be my go-to choice to start with, but privacy concerns and the fact that it stops working well with more people involved would eventually be a blocker.
Hey, my team and I were inspired by this exact use case and have been building something on our own. If you're interested please shoot me an email at xzhao254[at]gmail I would love to get your thoughts on it and maybe have you try it out.
Used Tandem, it sucked. The app is 250mb of Electron and it shows. I’ve never used something so simple with such a sluggish interface.
It was also really bad for privacy. You have to opt out of “automatically share window titles with everyone”, and Do-Not-Disturb still pops up notifications when people ignore the badge.
My boss got excited about this a few weeks back, but none of the rest of the office wanted to really use it (and we had some issues with video/audio feeds). I don't really get the idea: what problem does this solve that Slack/Zoom/etc don't? The whiteboard seems OK but no software can solve the problem that drawing with a touchpad sucks. Am I going to have to schedule meeting rooms again? Forget finding the right Zoom link, I now have to find the right room too? Stand around the water cooler when I'm on a break, except that then I won't be at my computer and so I can't actually use that? It's easy to talk to coworkers, but Slack is even easier. It's easy to start a meeting, but Zoom is no harder - and easier for people outside your organization. "How's the cafeteria?" is what one of my coworkers asked, jokingly, but I think that captures my feeling of it. Sure it's got a cafeteria, but that cafeteria doesn't solve any of the problems that a real cafeteria solves.
Then again, I'm also of the opinion that video calls provide little value beyond phone calls, so maybe I'm just a grump.
Look at the pricing model, this doesn't look like it's trying to replace any of those things.
It looks like you'd rent it out for an event or such. I can see that it would be a bit of a fun - if we're all on video / phone chats all day & we need to do a 'virtual offsite' it would be good to change the environment a little.
I can see this being useful for the occasional planning day etc.
I have no idea why they highlight the $2/user/8 hours when they also offer $7/user/month. The latter makes it clear that you could use this all day, every day.
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.
A big benefit, especially with more people, is that it's relatively painless and socially natural to break out into multiple small discussions (as might happen at say, a coffee meeting irl). The awkwardness of 12-person video calls is extremely painful in other software.
If you read the founders comment, they mention a lot of other use cases in addition to offices/work.
I would probably really dislike using this with coworkers or for "in the office." But I can imagine it being a good fit with some of the other, more social use cases.
Yeah other uses seem more plausible. My boss wanted to use it as a virtual office, where he sits at his desk and us at our cubicles, that kind of thing.
I had to think about it a bit, but I think in the end it's probably due to a couple bad experiences at startups. There's a lot of toxic, authoritarian company cultures out there that hide behind the idea that in order to be a good coworker you need to upbeat, peppy, and thrilled to be working at all times. It seems to go hand in hand with the (usually toxic and exploitative) work hard/play hard mentality.
If I were required to use this at work, I would instantly view it as a yellow/red flag that management is starting to get heavy handed about team culture, and I would probably start resenting it.
My ideal company culture is pretty minimal at this point: friendly people, a healthy work/life balance, and coworkers who are open to/good at learning - because that's what I strive for myself.
I'm probably coming off as a curmudgeon, and like I said maybe it's just due to some bad associations that come to mind, but this seems like it's starting down the path of "look how much fun our employees have at work!" My $.02.
That being said I wish you luck, and it seems like a neat option for more social settings.
Thanks for the really thoughtful feedback. I definitely hear this, and I think it would be crazy for us to think that we can build a single tool that will be useful across all ranges of team dynamics and culture.
FWIW, just like how companies can have different cultures around their physical spaces, they could have different practices/expectations set around the virtual space. For example, if there is now an expectation for people to be in the Gather office all the time, that seems like an issue with the company (and you could expect them to do other unpleasant things like, expect you to respond to Slack messages at 10 PM).
Another q would be: under the current paradigm, are you enjoying work from home more than physical offices? One of our goals here is to replicate the physical ones, so maybe this is just not directionally correct for you.
I also admit that I haven't had any of the particular experiences mention, so maybe I'm talking out of my sphere of knowledge here.
>FWIW, just like how companies can have different cultures around their physical spaces, they could have different practices/expectations set around the virtual space.
That's true, and it's not like I would quit my job if my team started using this, so maybe I would come around and appreciate it more. But initial gut reaction brings negative thoughts.
>Another q would be: under the current paradigm, are you enjoying work from home more than physical offices?
There are pros and cons for sure. I actually just transferred to a wfh permanent employee (although last time I was in an office was April), which I see as a net positive mostly due to how much time I save not commuting.
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.
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?
Tangenetially related, but check out Kaptivo Solo. It's (currently) free and does a great job of enhancing video of you writing a real physical whiteboard so it can actually be read on video calls. Of course, this requires you to have a physical whiteboard, but since I'm attending a lot of meetings in my office, I am fortunate to have one opposite my desk and it works great.
> In order for this to work I'd have to work all day with a camera on my face, if I understood this correctly. This sounds awful to me.
Yeah I wasn't sure, is that what they're suggesting as the use-case? Always-on video and mic sounds awful, even if most of the time no one sees it. My home is not my office, my "home office" is just a desk in my living room and I share this space. So opening a window to my home is, frankly, unwelcome.
One of the most important features here for work is actually explicitly not doing always-on camera/mic. We have a setting that makes it so that when you're not looking at the tab, no one can see/hear you, but other people can come up to you and "tap on your shoulder". If you do decide to engage with them, it's super frictionless.
This actually seems like a really good idea, taking both the sense of place/community that you get from games, and the productivity and environment that you get at work or a conference.
We tried this out for a few social events. It worked pretty well, but the choppy world movement makes me a little sick. :( Any chance of a smooth camera/movement option?
I have used gather.town briefly while attending a symposium. While some of the mechanics are complicated and take time getting used to, it was definitely an interesting experience and unique experience for attending posters in a symposium. However, I am not so sure if it provides much extra benefit than a traditional conference website with posters and social events hosted on Zoom (ex: ICML2020 was nicely set up).
Facebook is hosting a networking event for PyTorch Developer Day through gather.town so I am interested to see how that goes. Maybe I will see if gather.town is indeed significantly better for a social event vs. attending posters.
It's funny you mention ICML. After attending a smaller conference that used Gather.Town extensively for their poster session, I strongly believe ICML 2020 made the wrong decision in not trying it (outside of the sparsely populated social area/games room they had).
More specifically:
1. First off, the other conference took advantage of Gather.Town's full functionality! This included not only proper poster displays, but also sponsor screens with video embeds, virtual booths with actual humans milling about and an easy-to-navigate floorplan reminiscent of a real poster hall (numbers and all). At ICML, most of us were juggling multiple Zoom links and often forgot to or neglected viewing certain presentations because it took much effort to keep up.
2. In the same vein, ICML's poster session had none of the discoverability or ease of browsing of a physical poster gallery. You couldn't just walk past a poster, notice a crowd asking questions and pop by to listen in for a bit. The somewhat non-deterministic sorting/filtering functionality on the talks list page didn't help either. I saw a number of presenters awkwardly asking idle attendees if they had any questions, as well as folks waiting for a no-show presenter that had probably logged on for 10 minutes, seen an empty room and left the call. Gather.Town mitigates these phenomena by replicating some of the physical signals/affordances of a physical space with actual interested people around and thus makes the whole business of interacting around a poster feel more natural.
3. Post-conference, I saw many comments on Reddit and elsewhere from presenters frustrated by the lack of audience interaction and apparent appreciation/meaningful discussion for their work. It's crazy that some posters at a top-tier conference like ICML didn't get a single visitor. I think that's indicative of how poor the UX (discoverability, spatial cues, ease of browsing, etc.) was for that poster session. A platform like Gather.Town doesn't solve all of those issues, but man does it help.
I've used online.town before, and it's awesome to see that it's productized now with a lot of the features I wished. We used if for company gatherings and played games like hide and seek, and as a way to network with new people. The fact that things like podiums can now project voices, games are included, really make this so much more appealing. It's just a fun way to connect with people. Including random people. And you don't need many conversation starters, other than "cool platform right, want to go checkout the ...". So excited for this!
You can join Gather spaces from the phone browser, though it is missing features (most notably, you can't share your own video for performance reasons)
This sounds really neat. Analoging the reality into a virtual one with higher fidelity. I’m thinking about coming over from the other end (like thinking from first principles). Like what it means to be remote workplace? Why do we hangout at a workplace ? Etc I’m sure you folks would have thought about it a lot. I would love to see your conclusions.
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.
I actually haven’t thought deeply about this topic yet.
I think it’s a tricky to judge whether re-inventing the wheel is important and would yield better results or one should just stick with the norms.
And I genuinely believe that we definitely need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to workplaces. Trying to translate a physical workplace to a digital one seems logical but doesn’t feel right. And more importantly, if you come from that side, it surely makes the transition easier for people, but makes it very hard to re-invent the wheel because your lens (how you look at the problem) is now biased.
But then how do you re-invent the wheel?
I think one way is to just question everything and see if the past conclusions still hold true in this new reality. Once you have enough conclusions, you can maybe begin to think about how to model a solution with those conclusions in mind. Makes sense ?
I see! I think another angle, is to first create a virtual analog of a workplace, but then since it's virtual, it's super flexible and easy to experiment with. I think there's only so far you can get with these questions, off reasoning alone.
Another example of a project I worked on, which was similar, was this VR office: https://siemprecollective.com/vr.html . We basically made a one-to-one mapping of our physical office in VR, and the idea was after we had that, we could play around and tweak things very easily. And actually being able to TRY these new experiments was the whole point.
I love the idea! When I tried the official demo, the thing that I immediately noticed is the jagged scrolling movement of the screen when I move around.
I understand the pixel art style (I love it btw) and that the map is actually discrete pieces of tiles instead of fluid/pixels, but it's really visually jarring as I move around. If I move by pressing arrow keys once at a time that's fine, or if I even hold down arrow in one direction that's still okay, but if I move by quickly changing directions (e.g. moving diagonally) it almost hurts my head to look at the screen while my avatar is walking.
We've used Gather for a few company events and it's been super helpful for recreating as much of an in-person interaction style as possible. It outshines Zoom when you have more than 10 people in the same meeting and in more casual settings. Especially for office cultures that were heavily in-person like ours, it helps bolster the sense of team and collaboration that isn't the same over Slack/Zoom.
Are all of your assets original? The avatars look very suspiciously like the overland trainer sprites from Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire. When I was a kid I made “custom” Pokemon trainer sprites for fun and these look like something I would have made; just take a sprite sheet from spriters resource and edit away...
All the avatars and assets are original, though I concede that there is an avatar that looks like the pokemon trainer (and you're not the only one who's pointed this out :P)
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.
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[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadI'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.
- Have an option to start camera/mic turned off, and make it clear that your camera feed will be visible to people you approach. My own camera view and mic (and the option to turn them off) are also kind of easy to miss on my 27" screen.
- If I press and hold, say, S and then tap D, the avatar starts moving right and doesn't stop moving right until I release S. I'd expect it to continue moving downward when I release D.
https://www.gatherly.io/
And MakeSpace: https://makespace.fun/
And GroupRoom: https://grouproom.io/
Used it for a few 1:1s and sprint plannings. I love it!
But gatherly doesn't seem ready to serve my family and I if I have to request info (I can't just sign up).
What's the best, simple app like this that allows easy subconversations that my family, parents, other non-technical folks could easily join?
I don't mind paying to host but it has to be easy for them to log in and use.
I personally don't find virtual stuff fun, the pandemic is really sad, so wanted to make something available for public use. :)
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!
I've tried Gather and a few of the other competitors out there - out of all of them Gather nails the UX the most. It's pretty simple, but it's also powerful. Most of the other competitors in this space have thrown together a sloppy "business" platform, but Gather just feels much more accessible, friendly, and easy to use.
But I love it.
Yikes. As someone who's worked remotely for over a decade, I can't imagine starting a company with people I've never had a beer with.
I think it could work in virtual reality with Facebooks' emotive expressions, face tracking, etc. But if I'm in the middle of a workday, moving a little 2d character around doesn't feel very useful. But perhaps I'm wrong!
If this type of idea does actually get strong PM fit, the market size could be huge. So for VCs it seems like an interesting bet to make, even if the odds of success are low.
In particular, since there's no formalism around creating or scheduling meetings, it makes it extremely easy to walk up to people you know, chat for a few seconds, and then step away. Or for impromptu meetings to break out, where two people are chatting, and then another person joins, and soon there are 5-10 people in a larger discussion.
What it hasn't been able to resolve (at least for me) is the awkwardness of starting conversations with strangers. This is already awkward enough in person, where you kind of have to edge your way in to an existing conversation and wait for a lull to join in. Starting a cold 1-on-1 without reading body language is just not possible for me.
Remotely, there's no way to get over the step function of "in the conversation" where your face just pops up. For me, that lack of a gradient makes it very difficult to break the ice when meeting new people.
I think the physicality of Gather does help a bit, because (for example) you might sit at a "let's talk" table to indicate you're open to meeting new people, but that still basically translates to "extroverts go here". I'm not sure how to solve it long term, but I think tools like there are definitely a step in the right direction.
In scientific conferences, typically at the end of the day (e.g. after dinner, with drinks) you have "poster presentations". These presentations look pretty much like these images from Google [0]. Everyone goes to a big room, and the presenters stand in front of their posters which are ~90x120cm. People walk around looking at the poster titles figures, and when one of them catches their interest they stop to listen to the presenter (if they are already taking to a group) or ask him about it.
The fact that you have these big posters at all ends up being just a cue so people can identify who is working on which kinds of subjects/projects, and go talk to them about it. My advisor had this really funny idea of having "microposters" at a conference, where he just taped an A4 paper with one figure and the project title and his name to his back, and that is all it took to start conferences. It worked super great, it was exactly what it took to "break the ice".
In these conferences people will typically have read your papers, but they don't know your face, or even that you were in a paper (at most they will remember first author or last author, which is the professor). So just having a small cue "I'm Bob and I work on X" is already sufficient to break the ice.
My suggestion would be two things: 1) For mimicking the poster presentation aspect of scientific, to allow people to upload an image which gets displayed on an area of the map. Then the presenter can stand there, and interested folks just gather around him to listen.
2) Allow some kind of mouseover view that shows additional information about the person, eg a bio, a description of the projects, or a picture/link to a description of the projects.
I haven't yet seen a good virtual scientific conference, and it is exactly this aspect of the social interactions that is missing. In the end of the day, the primary reason why scientists move halfway around the globe to gather in a hotel for a few days is not to so much to listen to the speakers as it is to gather in small groups at breakfast/lunch/dinner/happy hour/breaks, and exchange ideas and get to know each other. Academic conferences allow people to put a face to the names they see in papers, and it really helps make science feel more humane and prompts you to exchange more.
Thanks!
[0]https://www.google.com/search?q=scientific%20poster%20presen...
Emojis are the body language of the web.
One is when someone is alone. Are they actually still physically present? Are they waiting for someone? In person, I can see if someone is actively scanning the room and appear open to a conversation.
The second is when a group of people are already engaged in a conversation. Are they discussing something a bit more private? Are they speaking my language? Do they appear open to having more people join the conversation. In real life, I can hear parts of a conversation from a distance and look at how those in the conversation are positioning their bodies relative to one another to make some judgements on this.
I'm not sure what you guys are using for the engine, but the primary feedback I have is that it feels too sluggish. For a second-home virtual space, it'd need to feel really good moving around in it.
Right now on my 2019 Macbook, in a one person blank room, I have frame rate drops moving around where my character will skip spaces. And in the HN room going to a different place (e.g. to swimming pool), I was walking around in darkness for 5 seconds about to exit thinking there was a bug before it finally rendered. Would recommend you guys really nail constant FPS as a priority.
Makes me think there must be something up with their security, I can't think of any other reason why they wouldn't give private paid plans for businesses.
There are a LOT of people who would jump over from slack.
For a very small remote organization, Discord would definitely be my go-to choice to start with, but privacy concerns and the fact that it stops working well with more people involved would eventually be a blocker.
It was also really bad for privacy. You have to opt out of “automatically share window titles with everyone”, and Do-Not-Disturb still pops up notifications when people ignore the badge.
Then again, I'm also of the opinion that video calls provide little value beyond phone calls, so maybe I'm just a grump.
It looks like you'd rent it out for an event or such. I can see that it would be a bit of a fun - if we're all on video / phone chats all day & we need to do a 'virtual offsite' it would be good to change the environment a little.
I can see this being useful for the occasional planning day etc.
I would probably really dislike using this with coworkers or for "in the office." But I can imagine it being a good fit with some of the other, more social use cases.
If I were required to use this at work, I would instantly view it as a yellow/red flag that management is starting to get heavy handed about team culture, and I would probably start resenting it.
My ideal company culture is pretty minimal at this point: friendly people, a healthy work/life balance, and coworkers who are open to/good at learning - because that's what I strive for myself.
I'm probably coming off as a curmudgeon, and like I said maybe it's just due to some bad associations that come to mind, but this seems like it's starting down the path of "look how much fun our employees have at work!" My $.02.
That being said I wish you luck, and it seems like a neat option for more social settings.
That being said, I love the concept and think it can make for some interesting online social events!
FWIW, just like how companies can have different cultures around their physical spaces, they could have different practices/expectations set around the virtual space. For example, if there is now an expectation for people to be in the Gather office all the time, that seems like an issue with the company (and you could expect them to do other unpleasant things like, expect you to respond to Slack messages at 10 PM).
Another q would be: under the current paradigm, are you enjoying work from home more than physical offices? One of our goals here is to replicate the physical ones, so maybe this is just not directionally correct for you.
I also admit that I haven't had any of the particular experiences mention, so maybe I'm talking out of my sphere of knowledge here.
That's true, and it's not like I would quit my job if my team started using this, so maybe I would come around and appreciate it more. But initial gut reaction brings negative thoughts.
>Another q would be: under the current paradigm, are you enjoying work from home more than physical offices?
There are pros and cons for sure. I actually just transferred to a wfh permanent employee (although last time I was in an office was April), which I see as a net positive mostly due to how much time I save not commuting.
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?
https://support.kaptivo.com/hc/en-us/categories/360001386698...
In order for this to work I'd have to work all day with a camera on my face, if I understood this correctly. This sounds awful to me.
I do think this would be really cool/fun for events, but for day-to-day work, I'd absolutely hate it.
Yeah I wasn't sure, is that what they're suggesting as the use-case? Always-on video and mic sounds awful, even if most of the time no one sees it. My home is not my office, my "home office" is just a desk in my living room and I share this space. So opening a window to my home is, frankly, unwelcome.
This actually seems like a really good idea, taking both the sense of place/community that you get from games, and the productivity and environment that you get at work or a conference.
I like it.
https://alex.gather.town/app/nO9uzqf6ZhzsXJ68/Grand%20Centra...
^^no guarantees on the stability of this server btw, I use it just to test random stuff so it might go down at any moment!
Facebook is hosting a networking event for PyTorch Developer Day through gather.town so I am interested to see how that goes. Maybe I will see if gather.town is indeed significantly better for a social event vs. attending posters.
More specifically:
1. First off, the other conference took advantage of Gather.Town's full functionality! This included not only proper poster displays, but also sponsor screens with video embeds, virtual booths with actual humans milling about and an easy-to-navigate floorplan reminiscent of a real poster hall (numbers and all). At ICML, most of us were juggling multiple Zoom links and often forgot to or neglected viewing certain presentations because it took much effort to keep up.
2. In the same vein, ICML's poster session had none of the discoverability or ease of browsing of a physical poster gallery. You couldn't just walk past a poster, notice a crowd asking questions and pop by to listen in for a bit. The somewhat non-deterministic sorting/filtering functionality on the talks list page didn't help either. I saw a number of presenters awkwardly asking idle attendees if they had any questions, as well as folks waiting for a no-show presenter that had probably logged on for 10 minutes, seen an empty room and left the call. Gather.Town mitigates these phenomena by replicating some of the physical signals/affordances of a physical space with actual interested people around and thus makes the whole business of interacting around a poster feel more natural.
3. Post-conference, I saw many comments on Reddit and elsewhere from presenters frustrated by the lack of audience interaction and apparent appreciation/meaningful discussion for their work. It's crazy that some posters at a top-tier conference like ICML didn't get a single visitor. I think that's indicative of how poor the UX (discoverability, spatial cues, ease of browsing, etc.) was for that poster session. A platform like Gather.Town doesn't solve all of those issues, but man does it help.
I think it’s a tricky to judge whether re-inventing the wheel is important and would yield better results or one should just stick with the norms.
And I genuinely believe that we definitely need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to workplaces. Trying to translate a physical workplace to a digital one seems logical but doesn’t feel right. And more importantly, if you come from that side, it surely makes the transition easier for people, but makes it very hard to re-invent the wheel because your lens (how you look at the problem) is now biased.
But then how do you re-invent the wheel?
I think one way is to just question everything and see if the past conclusions still hold true in this new reality. Once you have enough conclusions, you can maybe begin to think about how to model a solution with those conclusions in mind. Makes sense ?
Another example of a project I worked on, which was similar, was this VR office: https://siemprecollective.com/vr.html . We basically made a one-to-one mapping of our physical office in VR, and the idea was after we had that, we could play around and tweak things very easily. And actually being able to TRY these new experiments was the whole point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 1fgR7oeIXFA
I understand the pixel art style (I love it btw) and that the map is actually discrete pieces of tiles instead of fluid/pixels, but it's really visually jarring as I move around. If I move by pressing arrow keys once at a time that's fine, or if I even hold down arrow in one direction that's still okay, but if I move by quickly changing directions (e.g. moving diagonally) it almost hurts my head to look at the screen while my avatar is walking.