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Show HN: I built a new version of my fun spatial 3D online meeting app (flat.social)

4 points by pawelwentpawel ↗ HN
Hi HN!

flat.social is a fun spatial online meeting app for remote teams and communities. It's largely built like a web multiplayer game, and the 3D virtual spaces are highly customisable with elements and activities (I recently added surfing!).

Live demo to try it out: https://app.flat.social/f/demo-flat

Here's a quick demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeinBNqL23s

It's a solo, bootstrapped project built with Three.js, LiveKit and Rapier for physics. I built the first version during the pandemic and posted it here back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31833415

I had a couple of months off this year, so I locked myself in an (almost) jungle house in Brazil and rebuilt it into what I've always wanted it to be.

Would love to hear what you think!

37 comments

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findthebug
i call this the end game of social media
mtford
Very impressive, well done!
dangond
As someone who has seen and used (and disliked) many similar pieces of software, something about this feels much better and natural (I think it's that your avatar is just a circle with your video on it). Great job on nailing the feel of it!
jackb4040
Those videos of the actual webcam feeds are AI-generated, right? If I were you I would at least use the videos of real people from the original demo, if not try to have another live demo. Maybe not the highest priority but it does affect the first impression of the product and whether people assume it's a vibecoded mess under the hood or not.

Anyways, is source available anywhere?

toader
Are developers still in denial about the capabilities of coding agents, "vibecoded mess under the hood or not"? If the application works, do you think most users are thinking about the code quality?
micromacrofoot
I would work on affordances for when people with 0 gaming experience need to join, maybe a flat or simplified mode that someone can opt in to.

I have a lot of experience testing a defunct spatial conferencing app during the pandemic and gamers had fun with it but people with no gaming experience universally hated it and wanted nothing to do with it. There were no affordances or instructions that made a dent after months of trying.

prometheus1992
Okay, you got me on the first impressions. signed up. also, use a demo video which has real people doing those activities and smiling etc. A little bit of authenticity will go a long way here.
KolmogorovComp
this is unbearably slow and unusable on Safari.
pawelwentpawel
Thanks for the feedback! Initial couple seconds when the map is loading are indeed slow, I'll be optimising this as my priority in the next days.
kittikitti
This is really great and I hope it succeeds. I am waiting for a service that combines the virtual spaces concepts of Habbo Hotel into digital meeting spaces. I think Meta VR attempted this but it was too clunky (requires a headset). Mozilla Hubs attempted this too but it was too similar to Second Life and Roblox in the sense that things were not modular enough and it takes too long to do simple things.
pawelwentpawel
Thank you! There might not be as many elements in flat.social as there are in Habbo Hotel but I built an entire map builder which you can use to customise your space. There is a bunch of options - from procedural persian rugs to furnite, plants and lamps. You can even add a dill pickles jar that vigorously opens itself when you press enter.
Vishal_Max
This is so cool, i am going to try this with my friends, i will let you know about the experience.
coldblues
Performance is poor with frequent stutters.

I think we peaked at https://www.gather.town/

The only on-par open source solution is https://workadventu.re/, but it is impossible to self-host to the point that one would think they're doing it on purpose so that you pay them for hosting.

serf
>The only on-par open source solution is https://workadventu.re/, but it is impossible to self-host to the point that one would think they're doing it on purpose so that you pay them for hosting.

is there a name for this? I've seen it all over recently. Ente products are like that; it's self-hostable but you've gotta really want it.

One trademark of this : the first steps of install are easy, but then it progresses into this quagmire of no-docs/old-docs/presets that favor the company somehow.

one of these things, (maybe ente photos/auth?) were self-hostable but there was a secret button on the app that had to be known about to input a server URI outside of the cloud host. Why would you go to that extent if not to add friction?

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hmokiguess
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.

yawz
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.
hmokiguess
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.

Stevvo
[delayed]
hmokiguess
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.
lopis
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.

sockpuppers
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.

lateatdesk
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 :)
fittingopposite
> I had a couple of months off this year, so I locked myself in an (almost) jungle house in Brazil

Tell us more about this experience. Very interesting!

harvey9
Having a birds eye view changes the dynamic of an in person event because you can more easily observe who makes a beeline for who. But as someone who gets a headache from first person games I still prefer birds eye anyway.
pawelwentpawel
Thanks for feedback! You can actually select between a couple views - isometric, view from the top and first-person view.
raphman
Sounds interesting - especially as gather.town no longer offers an event option. However, the landing page uses 100% CPU and stutters a lot. Also, signup does not work for me, with https://app.flat.social/api/auth/signup returning 403 forbidden:

  {"success":false,"error":"Verification failed, please try again"}
(No captcha was shown on the page.)
monoRepo11
This looks cool! I think I would use it more as an online platform for friends rather than work or business. Maybe lean more into the social / games aspects
ricksunny
The UX sits in an interesting hybrid place between Gather App and Katmai - would be fun to try out with collaborators sometime
folder
Really lovely concept. I think your welcome map is too complex seems like that should be simplified for a good first experience for more devices. I'd like to be able to rotate around the map but seems like it's fixed in one direction.
pawelwentpawel
Thank you! There is a button to switch the type of view on the bottom left (isometric, top view, first person) which could help out here.

To release the balloons you need to press space and you will fall back down on the ground.

homeonthemtn
It's a cute social app. The moment it becomes forced "bonding" with your coworkers is the moment it gets weird and dystopian

Also the moment it gets a public room, you're getting a dick and balls chasing that soccer ball

Just saying

tamimio
It’s probably better to make and join roblox server, it looks cool nonetheless, that being said, that might make people do more meetings which is not really a good thing in general.