
MakeSpace – Virtual Spatial Chat - theanirudh
https://makespace.fun/
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jtwaleson
Super cool! Having spent so much time in Meet in the last months really makes
me think about the future. We should have technology that outperforms face to
face meetings, rather than just getting as close as possible to the "real
thing". Why can't I do the following:

\- see who's who (bio)

\- have pre-determined roles in the meeting (Mary is here as technical
specialist on x.y.z.)

\- have a set goal, agenda and timers per section

\- have a feedback form after/during the meeting

\- have stats about the meeting (who was actively participating, maybe via
gaze tracking or seeing whether the tab is in view). We're they speaking
aggressively, friendly, etc.

\- give automatic feedback about your own sound quality (hey, you should
really invest in a good headset)

\- allow in-system meeting notes, such as decisions made and actions to be
taken. Maybe even automatic?

\- have voting / polls

\- give audible feedback (claps) rather than the wall of mute icons

\- have a button to add participants to the call if they are late (it would
call their phone, pull rather than push).

\- sub-rooms and spatial audio are also a great idea

But no, instead we get virtual backgrounds and the never ending "sorry, I was
on mute".

My prediction: In 5 years, online meetings will be so much better than they
are today.

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saeranv
> \- have stats about the meeting (who was actively participating, maybe via
> gaze tracking or seeing whether the tab is in view). We're they speaking
> aggressively, friendly, etc.

This is one's dangerous. I'm actually finding it hard to think of a use case
for this where it isn't abusive and oppressive.

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jtwaleson
Here's one: If you see high disengagement, you know you have to improve as an
organizer or that the person should not have been invited.

~~~
saeranv
The context for my point is that we already have authoritarian countries (i.e
China, Russia) already using the internet for mass surveillance (and selling
the technology to other countries), we have Trump (who has to be considered at
least a quasi-authoritarian at this point) purging civil servant who are
insufficiently loyal to him.

And these are not power that will have intrinsic knowledge or care about
things we may understand intuitively: the error rate of a prediction model,
false positives/negatives in classification, the difficulty of producing a
reliable model of human emotion, how easy it is to build bias into a ML model,
etc.

~~~
jtwaleson
Agreed, the feature could be used for bad purposes. Does that mean we
shouldn't build it? That's a tough question.

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ctvo
Is this an idea or a product? The site is wordy, dense and has no link to a
download. I can't find a release date, pricing, a business model -- anything
worthwhile except very fancy mockups.

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sjf
The same thing as [https://spatial.chat/](https://spatial.chat/)?

~~~
Stevvo
Also [https://www.highfidelity.com/](https://www.highfidelity.com/)

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monkeydust
Looks interesting. Been trying out spatial.io that does feel like where this
is heading. You hear people differently dependkng where they are in the
virtual room - like you would in the real world - also when avatars got close
to each other it felt awkward (in a cool way).

~~~
imglorp
That doesn't sound terribly difficult to do with 2 channel audio and a handful
of participants. I imagine you just assign each person a location around a
circle and do the 2-1/2 D sound mixing, eh? Why don't current group conference
things do this out of the box?

[https://ask.audio/articles/creating-a-3d-mix-with-two-
speake...](https://ask.audio/articles/creating-a-3d-mix-with-two-speakers)

~~~
Stevvo
It's a somewhat limited approach. For more convincing positional audio you can
use a HRTF; [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-
related_transfer_function](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-
related_transfer_function)

Example:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA)

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caiobegotti
It was surprising to find Aza Raskin involved in the project, but it seems
they are not really after users at this point given the whole complicated Get
Involved thing. Very nice and interesting landing page though, I would love to
use it right now!

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mkchoi212
Looks so awesome. The spatial audio feature would be a game changer if
implemented correctly. The hold caps lock to broadcast your voice globally
seems like a super power that should be limited to the admin or something
though :O

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kwethor2006
Is this less a videoconferencing system, and more of a first draft of a shared
multiuser (and given Aza Raskin's previous tech demos, hopefully also
multiscale/zoomable) desktop environment with videoconferencing built in?
Because that would be super cool.

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hliyan
Really liked the idea of the "room" metaphor over using mute buttons. Also
using the CAPS to broadcast your voice at full volume to get attention (a
feature best reserved for respectful teams).

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gavribirnbaum
I loveee the concept of drawing rooms with a mouse to enable spontaneous
conversations. the site is incredibly wordy and doesn't drive a CTA, but that
is really nice. when can I use it?

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fermienrico
No everything on the internet needs to be about pixel trackers, A/B testing,
micromanipulating users, conversion rates, ARPU, analytics and all that
boohoo. Can we just pause for a second and be honest with our users? May be
respect them? Try to make insanely great products that people have no other
option than to _fall in love_ with them?

In fact, I want to go to sites that don't lie to me and backstab me, treat me
like some kinda of a ephemeral datapoint consuming their giant wad of VC cash.

I call these people sales-assholes or salesholes.

~~~
abalduevan
A/B testing is in fact often used to make insanely great product, how would
you otherwise know what your users actually want

~~~
fermienrico
Perhaps understanding the problem deeply, thoroughly and putting yourself in
the shoes of the customer insteading throwing a bunch of semi-random
iterations over the fence and squeezing every last bit of data from the
customer's private behavior?

Imagine if I buy tomatoes from the grocery store, but they run an A/B testing
on me to see what the customer wants - may be I prefer the 85% ripe ones over
95% ripe ones, the farmers watch the reaction of their users as they cook and
taste tomatoes in a live video stream from their customer's home. WTF, get out
of my house (browser). It is my private property. I just want a goddamn tomato
(send an email or post a photo or read news).

What happened to user's privacy? That last mile optimization is bothering me
as a user.

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lksslr
We are developing a similar idea, but in 3D instead of 2d
[https://laptopsinspace.de](https://laptopsinspace.de)

(No mobile support yet)

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baldomo
This is super cool, though I get stuck on "waiting" after giving the website
access to the camera and mic (and reloading)

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lksslr
that normally only happens if your webcam is already in use, but we surely
need better user feedback for that... I'd be happy to trouble shoot it with
you on twitter, dm me at @neeshstudio

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likeandshare
Resembles trember.me/video/

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carpenter
Yeah, know this one too. Easy to gather people there. They keep on adding
features.

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sdan
How’s the performance?

I’d love to use it, but I’m afraid my low-end MBP will turn its fans to 1000%

