
Show HN: Bigroom.video – better video social events - 4kevinking
Hello Hackernews!<p>Over the last couple of months I have been working on a new way to have social events over video (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bigroom.video).<p>As with the rest of the world, my last company transitioned to being completely remote with the rise of covid. We tried to emulate our old lunchroom and bar happy-hour dynamic over Zoom, but found that we could really only have one person speak at a time. With a 20 person Zoom lunch, this turns into each person telling a story one-by-one, people stepping on each others&#x27; toes, and a loss of the small dynamic conversations that would normally happen at any social event.<p>Bigroom has two major features that help bring the dynamism back to socializing.<p><i>Dynamic channels</i> let you break off into a separate conversation with one click. At any social event I&#x27;ve been to, people are always separated into groups of 3-6 and individuals bounce between those groups. Dynamic channels allow this behavior without the rigidity of Zoom breakout rooms.<p><i>Whispering</i> temporarily mutes your audio to everyone except one person. Click-and-hold on someone&#x27;s video to start whispering, and let go of your mouse to stop. It&#x27;s possible for two people to have a complete 1-on-1 conversation within a large group of people by whispering to each other.<p>Bigroom works on desktop Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, with mobile support planned. On the technical side, Bigroom consists of a web client and a websocket server, both written entirely in rust. I used the elm-like yew framework compiled to wasm for the frontend and async-tungstenite for the websocket backend. The entire client app compiles down to &lt;1MB.<p>Bigroom is completely free, with premium features coming in the future.<p>Looking forward to your feedback!<p>-Kevin
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4kevinking
[https://bigroom.video](https://bigroom.video) here's a clickable link since
HN doesn't parse URLs in the description :)

