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Launch HN: Gather.Town (YC S19) – Spatial video chat for remote teams

gather.town

41–50 of 163 posts

Re: Launch HN: Gather.Town (YC S19) – Spatial video chat for remote teams

#41
post #20

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?

We're actively working on this — I actually have a prototype running on my dev server at the moment: 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!

Thank you, that's so much better.

Re: Launch HN: Gather.Town (YC S19) – Spatial video chat for remote teams

#43

Isn’t this a knockoff of something posted earlier this year?

There are about half a dozen different, similar apps that all came out around the same time (I have one as well). I've done a lot of research on all of them and none of them are copies of any of the others. They all have pretty unique implementations.

Re: Launch HN: Gather.Town (YC S19) – Spatial video chat for remote teams

#44

Isn’t this a knockoff of something posted earlier this year?

There are about half a dozen different, similar apps that all came out around the same time (I have one as well). I've done a lot of research on all of them and none of them are copies of any of the others. They all have pretty unique implementations.

Can you post a list of them?

Re: Launch HN: Gather.Town (YC S19) – Spatial video chat for remote teams

#45
post #38

Aww man, I've been ideating around this exact idea for MSFT teams for a while now. (not like I had any time or buy-in for it) BRILLIANT. There is always a faint sense of jealousy and vindication when I see an idea being executed so close to what a person has been pushing for. Congrats ! I think you're onto something. I would readily pay for this if I could get my entire team to adopt it. (which I'd say is nearly impo…

I'm curious what you mean by this. Does Teams provide an API for building WebRTC apps?

Re: Launch HN: Gather.Town (YC S19) – Spatial video chat for remote teams

#46

You've got to implement smooth-movement. I used it for a few minutes and I'm nauseous. Just lerp from one-square to another over 120ms and ... scratch that, if I had implemented as nice a product as yours, I would just implement click-to-move. So your character smoothly moves to where you clicked (with a touch of A* path-finding). Only gamer's understand WASD, everyone understand's clicking.

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...

Re: Launch HN: Gather.Town (YC S19) – Spatial video chat for remote teams

#47
post #3

I really like the idea! Two small suggestions: - 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 expec…

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

Re: Launch HN: Gather.Town (YC S19) – Spatial video chat for remote teams

#49

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.
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