
Show HN: Bigroom.video – better video social events - 4kevinking
https://bigroom.video
======
4kevinking
Hello Hackernews!

Over the last couple of months I have been working on a new way to have social
events over video ([https://bigroom.video](https://bigroom.video)).

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'
toes, and a loss of the small dynamic conversations that would normally happen
at any social event.

Bigroom has two major features that help bring the dynamism back to
socializing.

 _Dynamic channels_ let you break off into a separate conversation with one
click. At any social event I'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.

 _Whispering_ temporarily mutes your audio to everyone except one person.
Click-and-hold on someone's video to start whispering, and let go of your
mouse to stop. It's possible for two people to have a complete 1-on-1
conversation within a large group of people by whispering to each other.

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 <1MB.

All video and audio is transmitted over peer-to-peer WebRTC connections. This
puts a natural limit to how many people can be actively using video in a
single channel (depending on the computer I find it is between 10 and 20),
although I am considering a client-server architecture in the future to make
it scale similarly to zoom.

Bigroom is in free open beta and doesn't even require an account to use.

Looking forward to your feedback!

-Kevin

------
agrinman
I’ve been using bigroom for a few weeks now to catch up with friends and
family. It makes an unbelievable difference when you can have multiple
conversations. It’s almost like you’re at a dinner table! Highly recommend
this. Zoom feels like a work meeting, and this feels like a social gathering.

