

Ask HN: Please review my 3D+VOIP web project (Assemblive.com) - hme
http://www.assemblive.com/home/
We've been working on this for a year now, it's fully embeddable inside any web page
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hme
An interesting aspect of Assemblive for you, hackers, is that you can embedd a
3D+VOIP widget into any web site. You can add realtime interactions and self
awareness of your visitors with only a few lines of code. Here is a screencast
of it (sorry for the french accent ;)
[http://aworldforus.tumblr.com/post/287534616/assemblive-
widg...](http://aworldforus.tumblr.com/post/287534616/assemblive-widget-a-
convenient-way-to-embed)

~~~
blake57
Which accent ^^ ?

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Caligula
I run ubuntu. Got this message:

ASSEMB'LIVE requires one the following operating systems: Windows or MacOS X.
Please switch on one of these to go further.

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hme
Yes, we use Unity3D, a web plugin to run hardware accelerated 3D in the
browser. They don't support Linux yet, but now that they raised a huge amount
of money from Sequoia they might work on it (if they want to support ChromeOS
they'd better hury)

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olalonde
Any reason why you chose Unity3D over Google's O3D
(<http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/>) ?

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Xixi
Comparing Unity3D to O3D is a bit like comparing the Unreal Engine to OpenGL.
Unity3D is much higher level, and provides lots of things like Ageia PhysX™,
etc.

On the other hand not having to install a plugin would be a killer, so we are
definitely keeping an eye on WebGL...

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etherealG
an interesting idea, but is the 3D really necessary? I would think a multi-
stream voice / video chat in normal window type interfaces like we're used to
online would be better.

Even better would be to integrate with existing voice chat apps, like voice
chat in googletalk, but with support for "conference calls" in video and
voice.

I just don't see this as a good idea, the implementation looks great though.

~~~
hme
The whole idea of this is to allow large groups events. Think 20+
participants. Using 3D allows us to spatialize the event, while staying very
dynamic. Groups can form, change, recreate just by moving. The sound is
spatialized too, so it could scale to hundreds, thousands of persons. Just
using regular voice would make an awful noise. 3D splits group very naturally,
while staying dynamic and most of all, intuitive because it's very similar to
regular networking events. It could obviously be done by creating voice groups
on a "flat screen", but we strongly believe in the power of real world
analogies, to make it immersive and help people understand how to behave in
this.

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joubert
I like the name (although not sure how to pronounce).

"Avatar" could also be a cool name. ;-)

~~~
Xixi
On the other hand we are a French startup, so our pronunciation probably
doesn't make much sense for native English speakers.

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blazzerbg
looks very cool, but animation can make it inappropriate for serious business
events/meetings

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olivier75
When do you plan to leave beta stage?

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jerome_etienne
nice job. instinctive and easy to use. a good tool to have virtual conference

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rikbold
Try it now button awesome.

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Steph_D
thx, that was my humble contribution ;-)

