It's a cross between Zoom x Pokemon. You only get audio and video from people you're standing next to, and as you walk away from them, the video fades away and the audio drops off.
With current video chat apps, you lose many of the dynamics of real life meetups. In particular, you lose the ability to have multiple people in the same shared space having multiple conversations.
In real life events, you can talk to a few people at a time while still being able to quickly go from one conversation to the next. With video chat, you have to talk to everyone at the same time.
Online Town is meant to fix this.
The way it works is, when you're near someone you get their audio and video, when you walk away from them their video drops off, and their audio fades out.
So you can have multiple conversations within a single virtual space.
Join me in the public room! Would love to get your all thoughts on it :)
Hi Liamuk! You won't believe this but I was working on this exact idea all of yesterday and shipped a basic version with proximal audio and a 2D canvas to display players. It's not ready for HN traffic yet, but I joined Online Town and ran into Cyrus.
We had a great ~10 minute video chat in the middle of the street about the possibilities of virtual realms. I've just popped him an email and sent some techno recommendations :).
Good luck with Online Town! I think we'll see a whole spate of similar ideas focusing on a variety of niches.
This is a great feature. Having been to a 100-person conference on Zoom which tried to emulate social activities by splitting large groups in Zoom breakout rooms, there is clearly a need for a service like this. Congrats on shipping!
Hi. I think this is a great idea - particularly as I'm unable to visit my girlfriend and 4 stepkids in the lockdown (I don't live with them), and I've been having meals with them (Saturday breakfast is a 'thing') via standard video call.
Just tried online town (I'm on Firefox 75 on Windows) with my girlfriend (she was on her ipad), and I could see my video in a box, and she could see her video in a box, but we couldn't see each other. The fade in/out worked on distance, but only of the box - no audio or video of each other.
She was also initially unwilling to enter the room as she thought she'd be in a room with three men (from the sample image given when visiting a room link) - I know it says 'on the left there's an example', but maybe that might need replacing?
Really great idea, though, and much needed at the moment!
I am building this too atm, but a slightly different implementation (python backend en typescript frontend).
I started saturday; I've had the idea longer, but that it's more like a feature than a product kept me from building it.
Nice work, keep it up!
Surprised no one has replied here. I've been thinking about the same problem for the past few weeks regarding real life group dynamics in digital mediums. Interesting stuff, wish you all the best
This is very neat. The whole idea of having multiple ongoing conversations in the same world that you can just walk closer to hear reminds a lot of Sun's Project Wonderland from ~10 years ago.
Sounds like a new concept. Has anyone ever tried this approach of a virtual real-life emulating community with video calls?
A lot of community building questions still apply though and I'd love to see them answered. How do you plan to deal with nefarious characters or just general sexually motivated trolls (if any)? Is there moderation of some kind? Community rules in general? Sign up integration in the future? I couldn't find it on the home page (though I may be thinking too much about it - the whole purpose of this might be a 'real' virtual world with sign-ups being a redundancy)
Either way, do not, in any way take my comment to be nit picky or leaning towards the critic side - I'm a genuinely interested user. Just an inquisitive one :) All the best.
Another take on this idea of having positional audio is Mozilla Hubs. It’s kind of like a simplified VRChat that runs in the browser. Also has mobile support on iOS and Android.
Sounds similar to a product called iSee out of Australia used in school systems there.
"iSee is just like being in the real world, where your voice fades out with distance and you walk around to talk to others and look at what interests you."
I've spent the last 2-3 hours in here and have talked to maybe half a dozen people about all kinds of things. This is just such a fun way to get together and have a conversation, and there are so many possibilities.
Thanks a TON to Cyrus for being such an engaging host and sharing his thoughts about what's going on and how people are thinking about the service!
Really cool idea. I've been thinking a lot about how to have a party online (zoom parties are inevitably terrible), and this seems like a great step towards recreating real-world social experiences
Something I noticed is that you can collide with other characters, so if you have three other friends, you can effectively isolated people by collaborating and standing around them, and there is no escape but to reload the page.
If you get surrounded by four people, a textbox appears saying that you can press <space> to teleport out. A larger group of people could form a ring to entrap people, but that's harder to coordinate.
We used this for a remote company “happy hour” today. This was the most fun I’ve had with online video in a long time. We had a few “pods” that gradually merged and split throughout the event.
Tried this with a group of friends today and it was a lot of fun. The fading is a great touch. Main thing we wanted was a minimap, or some way for new arrivals to find us. Nice work!
Sococo has a similar idea. I've tried it in a few places and for some reason it never really sticks. Maybe we're doing it wrong.
I understand the map is supposed to be NYC. I would use something more people friendly (you don't need car-centric roads when there are no cars!) with more greenery. Right now the map feels a bit odd to me, a bit like a post-apocalyptic world. Maybe that's appropriate for the current time.
This was a fantastic experience! Probably the first time I've felt that online catchups could be like group ones. Had a good chat with Cyrus and some others. I could really imagine myself hanging out on here more often (despite never really being one for chatrooms).
Thank you for making this! I had a blast.
(Guy - Australia)
This is so awesome. So neat to see lots of people here. I totally want to use this -- especially if there is a plan individuals can afford (ex. for board game nights).
This is definitely interesting. It reminds me of the bulletin boards slash chat rooms built by the fictional company Mutiny in the series Halt and Catch Fire.
A suggestion, I can basically create multiple 'people' by opening the app in multiple tabs, though it does seem to know me because the nickname seems to remain the same, maybe you should look at a way of allowing a single persona at a given time, if that is possible?
I've been looking for something like this for the past couple of weeks, so I'm super excited to try it.
Another thing I think would be great would be shared virtual backgrounds depending on where on the map you are. My team has tried to hack this together manually (standups taking place with everyone having a background photo of our abandoned office space,etc) but an automated zoom plugin or similar would be great.
Thank you. This is so great. I am curious how one can implement these multi-channels and always-on communication. Are they via WebRTC? Don't they get prohibitively expensive?
PlayStation Home RIP wasnt video calls but avatars in a virtual space. Something you have to have for folks not willing or able to do video so the same thing in essence.
One of the creators here.
It's a cross between Zoom x Pokemon. You only get audio and video from people you're standing next to, and as you walk away from them, the video fades away and the audio drops off.
With current video chat apps, you lose many of the dynamics of real life meetups. In particular, you lose the ability to have multiple people in the same shared space having multiple conversations.
In real life events, you can talk to a few people at a time while still being able to quickly go from one conversation to the next. With video chat, you have to talk to everyone at the same time.
Online Town is meant to fix this.
The way it works is, when you're near someone you get their audio and video, when you walk away from them their video drops off, and their audio fades out.
So you can have multiple conversations within a single virtual space.
Join me in the public room! Would love to get your all thoughts on it :)