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

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

#161

Post by eambutu » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 12:01 AM UTC

munfred wrote: post #66

eambutu wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

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

#162

Post by bshanks » Thu, Nov 12, 2020, 5:07 AM UTC

fblp wrote: post #104

eambutu wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 wrist…

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.

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

#163

Post by Firefox78 » Fri, Nov 20, 2020, 10:15 PM UTC

afidrya wrote: post #139

akersten wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand more on "Android phones don't allow WebRTC video chat to work on any browser except Chrome?" My brief research[0] would indicate that WebRTC is indeed supported on FF Mobile and has been supported since 2013[1]. [0]: https://caniuse.com/?search=webrtc [1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/09/17/webrtc-now-availabl...

Firefox dropped H264 support 1 year ago because of Google Play Store policies. This codec was required for interacting with iOS devices which did not have VP8. However, VP8 has been added since iOS 12.1, so it might be possible to use it now across all platforms. - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1548679 - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Rel...

While Firefox had to drop support for OpenH264 on Android, because of Google's Play Store policies. It is not true that only Chrome supports H264 on Android. Firefox switched to the Android platform encoder and decoder. So H264 work fine in recent versions of Firefox.