Show HN: Free 3D virtual office in the browser
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Re: Show HN: Free 3D virtual office in the browser
#2One of authors here. As a kid, some of my most meaningful relationships and experiences were forged through online gaming (UO anyone?). A big part of this wasn’t necessarily the game itself, but was instead the sense of place and community afforded through the shared environment.
As an adult, many of my most meaningful relationships have come from my work environment. When working remotely or in a distributed setting, however, I find this not to be the case. Existing tools such as Slack and Zoom simply don’t cut it. Individual productivity may benefit, but the culture is fundamentally lacking.
As a leader and someone who has founded and built a large company, I have experienced first-hand how critical it is to have a highly engaged team. This affects everything from communication to culture and company values. Moreover, there is a lack of innovation that spontaneous whiteboard sessions and more fluid communication styles afford.
Spot is the culmination of a year of research and development to recreate a highly engaged workplace with smooth and natural interactions. (Not to mention, it is also a lot of fun!). Would appreciate some feedback from the HN community.
Re: Show HN: Free 3D virtual office in the browser
#3One of authors here. As a kid, some of my most meaningful relationships and experiences were forged through online gaming (UO anyone?). A big part of this wasn’t necessarily the game itself, but was instead the sense of place and community afforded through the shared environment. As an adult, many of my most meaningful relationships have come from my work environment. When working remotely or in a distributed setting…
I surprisingly love using these kinds of environments and this one looks neat.
What’s going to be the pricing model moving forward. Surely voice and such can’t be free in perpetuity.
Nice work!
Re: Show HN: Free 3D virtual office in the browser
#4One of authors here. As a kid, some of my most meaningful relationships and experiences were forged through online gaming (UO anyone?). A big part of this wasn’t necessarily the game itself, but was instead the sense of place and community afforded through the shared environment. As an adult, many of my most meaningful relationships have come from my work environment. When working remotely or in a distributed setting…
I'm definitively going to propose we try it to see if it makes interactions better for our case.
Re: Show HN: Free 3D virtual office in the browser
#5One of authors here. As a kid, some of my most meaningful relationships and experiences were forged through online gaming (UO anyone?). A big part of this wasn’t necessarily the game itself, but was instead the sense of place and community afforded through the shared environment. As an adult, many of my most meaningful relationships have come from my work environment. When working remotely or in a distributed setting…
I surprisingly love using these kinds of environments and this one looks neat. What’s going to be the pricing model moving forward. Surely voice and such can’t be free in perpetuity. Nice work!
Good question! Right now we are fortunate to have some AWS credits to subsidize some voice costs :P. At the moment our focus is on usage, but our goal is to have a freemium model based on the size of the space, premium assets, etc.
Re: Show HN: Free 3D virtual office in the browser
#6There are a lot of virtual office tools out there (I'm not affiliated with any so I feel comfortable asking this question). What makes Spot compelling vs. the alternatives? And if the main difference is 3D, how have you leveraged that to create a differentiated experience?
Re: Show HN: Free 3D virtual office in the browser
#7One of authors here. As a kid, some of my most meaningful relationships and experiences were forged through online gaming (UO anyone?). A big part of this wasn’t necessarily the game itself, but was instead the sense of place and community afforded through the shared environment. As an adult, many of my most meaningful relationships have come from my work environment. When working remotely or in a distributed setting…
Love it :) Would try to get my team on board, but I work in gov where we can only use MS Teams. I feel like using this would add a lot of fun to the day.
Re: Show HN: Free 3D virtual office in the browser
#8Feel free to call me cynical, but do low level employees want systems like this? I've seen a few spacial chat systems pass through HN in the past few months. From a pure social application standpoint both spot and other options seem to be reasonably well executed, though it seems at odds with the natural flow of workplace interactions. I guess it might be a perceived lack of privacy in conversations? When talking to another individual in an online case it's generally either fully public or fully private. Having unexpected intrusions in something with the base mentality of being private seems unpleasant.
Personally given the corporate cultures I've been in using a spacial social chat environment feels like it would lead to rather forced interactions, unnatural intrusions, and micromanagement of execs seeing interactions as something to be mismanaged rather than an organic phenomena. When used in a purely social sense the tools seem great and plenty novel (due to lack of hierarchies and allowing multiple unrelated conversations to form and occur simultaneously), just not in the current application domain?
Who knows, perhaps I just have been dealing with orgs with bad culture, but I struggle to see the concept adopted well. Great looking execution though despite my reservations.
Re: Show HN: Free 3D virtual office in the browser
#9The "Start now for free" button triggers my 'dubious payment schema' sense. How does this scale with more members? What does the pricing plan look like?
Re: Show HN: Free 3D virtual office in the browser
#10One of authors here. As a kid, some of my most meaningful relationships and experiences were forged through online gaming (UO anyone?). A big part of this wasn’t necessarily the game itself, but was instead the sense of place and community afforded through the shared environment. As an adult, many of my most meaningful relationships have come from my work environment. When working remotely or in a distributed setting…
I'd like to try this, but the "Try Now for Free!" button wants me to create an account - I don't want to create an account just to have a quick look. I'd much rather have a quick look, then maybe create an account later if I wanted to try it more meaningfully.
If you're an HN regular, I guess you were expecting a comment like this - is there an open URL we can use just to get a feel for it?