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Partying over Internet: Technological Aspects

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Re: Partying over Internet: Technological Aspects

#41

Post by chimprich »

What I'd like in an online party platform is a shared social area divided into conversations you can join. This is for both social bandwidth and network bandwidth. In real life conversations naturally form and fork off into new ones.

This needs to be more than just separate channels for it to work well. There should be some bleeding of audio between adjacent conversations, and maybe some limited video. I'm thinking perhaps "avatars" of people that get updated once a minute with their current video feed so you can look around the shared social area and get an idea of what is going on and have some sort of shared atmosphere. Maybe a shared background music track?

Re: Partying over Internet: Technological Aspects

#43

Post by def8cefe »

snikch wrote: post #13

I've been thinking about this too. In fact I've started hacking on an app to solve this for my group of friends. To me the two primary issues are: 1. Sub groups without losing the context of the full group. I want to focus on a set of people and chat with them while also aware of what other groups are around. I want to be able to bring people into these groups at will. This also adds a gamification aspect where you c…

>Sub groups without losing the context of the full group.

Different 'rooms'? You could keep the video tiles for all people on screen organized by room, then the individual chooses which one to join for audio. You could include a push-to-talk 'announce' button to send your audio to all rooms in addition to the normal open mic in the room you belong to at that time.

I picture a mosaic of webcam feeds that have border lines drawn to indicate group members.

Re: Partying over Internet: Technological Aspects

#44

Post by gfodor »

samename wrote: post #21
gfodor wrote: post #5

Consider using avatar chat, which has been shown to be able to deliver social presence, esp w VR. https://extendedmind.io/blog/2020/3/20/video-conferencing-wo... Example of a house party thrown in hubs: https://www.facebook.com/1365390312/posts/10216647011272117/...

I’m not familiar with avatar chat, but it does seem VR would solve some of the problems mentioned in the article (seeing the whole body, meaningful interactions, side conversations). The problem with VR is it’s not widely used at the moment. Maybe this will change as a result?

Yep many of the benefits can be delivered without a VR headset (that's part of the gist of my post) - worth checking out.

Re: Partying over Internet: Technological Aspects

#45

Post by danbmil99 »

jpindar wrote: post #11
danbmil99 wrote: post #7

There's always Second Life

Or the open source equivalent, Open Simulator. https://opensimworld.com/dir http://opensimulator.org

I should have mentioned that. How is that project going? I wrote the first physics engine 10 years ago.

Re: Partying over Internet: Technological Aspects

#46

Post by jpindar »

danbmil99 wrote: post #45
jpindar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the open source equivalent, Open Simulator. https://opensimworld.com/dir http://opensimulator.org

I should have mentioned that. How is that project going? I wrote the first physics engine 10 years ago.

It's under active development, including adding features to stay mostly compatible with Second Life. Bakes on mesh will probably be the next big feature. Firestorm is probably the most popular viewer. I think BulletSim is now the default physics engine. There are two grid-independent currency systems, Podex and Gloebits.

I heard somewhere that there are around 300 public grids, most of which are on the hypergrid. There are a few significant forks, most notably Halcyon (created by the late InWorldz LLC) but there are only a handful of grids running those.

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