from Hacker News

Show HN: Online Town – A better way to gather online

by liamuk on 4/8/20, 11:27 PM with 46 comments

• by liamuk on 4/9/20, 12:17 AM

  Hi HN!

  One of the creators here.

  It's a cross between Zoom x Pokemon. You only get audio and video from people you're standing next to, and as you walk away from them, the video fades away and the audio drops off.

  With current video chat apps, you lose many of the dynamics of real life meetups. In particular, you lose the ability to have multiple people in the same shared space having multiple conversations.

  In real life events, you can talk to a few people at a time while still being able to quickly go from one conversation to the next. With video chat, you have to talk to everyone at the same time.

  Online Town is meant to fix this.

  The way it works is, when you're near someone you get their audio and video, when you walk away from them their video drops off, and their audio fades out.

  So you can have multiple conversations within a single virtual space.

  Join me in the public room! Would love to get your all thoughts on it :)

• by Fiveplus on 4/11/20, 4:38 AM

  Sounds like a new concept. Has anyone ever tried this approach of a virtual real-life emulating community with video calls?

  A lot of community building questions still apply though and I'd love to see them answered. How do you plan to deal with nefarious characters or just general sexually motivated trolls (if any)? Is there moderation of some kind? Community rules in general? Sign up integration in the future? I couldn't find it on the home page (though I may be thinking too much about it - the whole purpose of this might be a 'real' virtual world with sign-ups being a redundancy)

  Either way, do not, in any way take my comment to be nit picky or leaning towards the critic side - I'm a genuinely interested user. Just an inquisitive one :) All the best.

• by tcoff91 on 4/11/20, 7:35 AM

  Another take on this idea of having positional audio is Mozilla Hubs. It’s kind of like a simplified VRChat that runs in the browser. Also has mobile support on iOS and Android.

  https://hubs.mozilla.com/

• by jimmySixDOF on 4/11/20, 7:01 AM

  Sounds similar to a product called iSee out of Australia used in school systems there.

  "iSee is just like being in the real world, where your voice fades out with distance and you walk around to talk to others and look at what interests you."

  [1] https://www.iseevc.com.au

• by sdrothrock on 4/11/20, 8:10 AM

  I've spent the last 2-3 hours in here and have talked to maybe half a dozen people about all kinds of things. This is just such a fun way to get together and have a conversation, and there are so many possibilities.

  Thanks a TON to Cyrus for being such an engaging host and sharing his thoughts about what's going on and how people are thinking about the service!

• by ksj2114 on 4/11/20, 4:22 AM

  Really cool idea. I've been thinking a lot about how to have a party online (zoom parties are inevitably terrible), and this seems like a great step towards recreating real-world social experiences

• by capableweb on 4/11/20, 10:41 AM

  Heh, it's cute.

  Something I noticed is that you can collide with other characters, so if you have three other friends, you can effectively isolated people by collaborating and standing around them, and there is no escape but to reload the page.

• by severak_cz on 4/11/20, 12:14 PM

  Similar idea to which I contributed. This one is built on top of Jitsi.

  https://github.com/capnmidnight/lozya

• by tetrahedr0n on 4/11/20, 7:10 AM

  2d proto-"Ready Player One"

  This is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time; brilliant.

  Is this open source? If so, I would love to contribute.

• by jtokoph on 4/11/20, 6:04 AM

  We used this for a remote company “happy hour” today. This was the most fun I’ve had with online video in a long time. We had a few “pods” that gradually merged and split throughout the event.

• by bdr on 4/11/20, 4:41 AM

  Tried this with a group of friends today and it was a lot of fun. The fading is a great touch. Main thing we wanted was a minimap, or some way for new arrivals to find us. Nice work!

• by noelwelsh on 4/11/20, 7:36 AM

  Sococo has a similar idea. I've tried it in a few places and for some reason it never really sticks. Maybe we're doing it wrong.

  I understand the map is supposed to be NYC. I would use something more people friendly (you don't need car-centric roads when there are no cars!) with more greenery. Right now the map feels a bit odd to me, a bit like a post-apocalyptic world. Maybe that's appropriate for the current time.

• by fileyfood500 on 4/11/20, 5:04 PM

  Made it to hacker news!! Congrats all!!

  I wonder if you would consider open sourcing the map creation component? I’d love to contribute

  I tried this for a passover and unfortunately the servers were really laggy at that time so we stuck with zoom/Jitsi and gave up the fadeout

  For primoserver, it’s similar but definitely needs a larger map, appeared to have lag issues on calls.

• by atiredturte on 4/11/20, 2:22 PM

  This was a fantastic experience! Probably the first time I've felt that online catchups could be like group ones. Had a good chat with Cyrus and some others. I could really imagine myself hanging out on here more often (despite never really being one for chatrooms).

  Thank you for making this! I had a blast. (Guy - Australia)

• by katlin on 4/11/20, 7:03 AM

  Ah this is super cute! Literally sending this to everyone i know.

• by armagon on 4/11/20, 7:37 AM

  This is so awesome. So neat to see lots of people here. I totally want to use this -- especially if there is a plan individuals can afford (ex. for board game nights).

• by arjinium on 4/11/20, 5:38 PM

  This is definitely interesting. It reminds me of the bulletin boards slash chat rooms built by the fictional company Mutiny in the series Halt and Catch Fire.

  A suggestion, I can basically create multiple 'people' by opening the app in multiple tabs, though it does seem to know me because the nickname seems to remain the same, maybe you should look at a way of allowing a single persona at a given time, if that is possible?

• by shtack on 4/11/20, 6:34 AM

  I've been looking for something like this for the past couple of weeks, so I'm super excited to try it.

  Another thing I think would be great would be shared virtual backgrounds depending on where on the map you are. My team has tried to hack this together manually (standups taking place with everyone having a background photo of our abandoned office space,etc) but an automated zoom plugin or similar would be great.

• by thereyougo on 4/11/20, 5:39 AM

  Please keep the graphic in this quality.

  It gives an easy-going/fun vibe to the game.

• by elk235 on 4/11/20, 8:08 AM

  Thank you. This is so great. I am curious how one can implement these multi-channels and always-on communication. Are they via WebRTC? Don't they get prohibitively expensive?

• by tekchip on 4/11/20, 4:41 PM

  PlayStation Home RIP wasnt video calls but avatars in a virtual space. Something you have to have for folks not willing or able to do video so the same thing in essence.

• by genki_af on 4/11/20, 10:37 AM

  I love this so much. Completely new paradigm of online chat.

• by anticsapp on 4/11/20, 2:56 PM

  That is so cool. For the first few minutes everyone ran away from me :( But then I was welcomed into a convo.

• by rollinDyno on 4/11/20, 1:25 PM

  I think the concept is cool but after walking a few steps the game just freezes for me. Will try again later.

• by caditinpiscinam on 4/18/20, 3:48 AM

  Used this for the past hour hanging out with friends remotely - super fun!

• by simzor on 4/11/20, 11:22 AM

  2D VR-Chat with a cam! Really cool stuff :)

• by atum47 on 4/12/20, 1:46 AM

  really cool, met two very nice Canadians there. I hope this catches on. People will have a blast using it.