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Show HN: I built a fun video meeting app with 2D physics and proximity chat

flat.social

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Re: Show HN: I built a fun video meeting app with 2D physics and proximity chat

#51

Post by jhugo »

jupp0r wrote: post #43
jhugo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any reason for doing audio and video work on the backend rather than adopting the (much easier to scale) SFU model and just forwarding packets? Similarly for the physics, seems like doing that work frontend would scale much better.

Even if you use stream forwarding only, network will be a major O(n) cost factor when using cloud providers, at least for video. There is also some super interesting middle ground between full video forwarding and selective reencoding by using SVC for cheap video resizing on the backend.

SFUs aren't forwarding everything. Using either discrete simulcast layers or SVC they're forwarding one size out of several (usually 3) to each other participant.

Bandwidth will be a high cost no matter what (and anyone planning to scale up real-time video better be prepared to move off the cloud at some point) but needing compute resources for encode/decode on the backend makes large scale realtime video infeasible for any reasonable cost. The only successful large scale deployments push most compute work to the clients.

An extra decode/encode step also adds latency and the total latency budget before UX is impacted is small.

Re: Show HN: I built a fun video meeting app with 2D physics and proximity chat

#52

Post by aklarfeld »

This is absolutely awesome. As someone who has used Gather a bit, this blows it out of the water. Incredibly intuitive and fun way to move around and talk to your friends and coworkers. Once you realize that you don't need, nor want, the 8-bit paradigm to interact with folks, Flat.social clearly becomes the superior way to interact virtually.

Re: Show HN: I built a fun video meeting app with 2D physics and proximity chat

#55

Post by pawelwentpawel »

hnlmorg wrote: post #45
WoodenChair wrote: post #4

How is it different from InSpace? https://inspace.chat/ What’s the future revenue model? How expensive are the servers?

That seems to be more corporate / educational focused. There's a few of these types of solutions around though. I've used Gather ( https://www.gather.town/ ) before because I quite liked it's retro aesthetic. However this Show HN submission looks a lot more polished. So kudos to the devs there.

Thank you! It's just one dev, that's me :)

Re: Show HN: I built a fun video meeting app with 2D physics and proximity chat

#57

Post by herschel113 »

Also see https://workadventu.re/ .

Already seen it working well for 1000+ visitors congress meeting hub.

Plus it has some well matured Web 1.0 capabilities: Everyone can host space by a simple file server and link with other existing spaces. As the rooms / spaces do not need to be hosted on the same server the application is served by.

Re: Show HN: I built a fun video meeting app with 2D physics and proximity chat

#59

Post by mas-ev »

hnlmorg wrote: post #45
WoodenChair wrote: post #4

How is it different from InSpace? https://inspace.chat/ What’s the future revenue model? How expensive are the servers?

That seems to be more corporate / educational focused. There's a few of these types of solutions around though. I've used Gather ( https://www.gather.town/ ) before because I quite liked it's retro aesthetic. However this Show HN submission looks a lot more polished. So kudos to the devs there.

Gather town is pretty awesome. My team held a 300 person internal event on that platform. People seemed to really enjoy it. They got a hang of it pretty fast without prior experiences playing games.

I do like the idea of an online proximity focused office space but I couldn't get my team to buy into the idea of it. Async messaging on slack is preferred.

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