I was interested in building something like this when COVID-19 first hit. I think it's still a space with a lot of potential, but there are now a huge number of competitors. I made a spreadsheet and add to it each time I see one of these products come up on HN: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1R5DXWtz4H7eIT5VbGYJE...
There are currently at least 18 projects operating in this space.
- The majority (maybe all?) of them are browser-based (probably because it's easy to throw something together with all the JS webrtc example projects out there).
- Most of them seem to be trying to sell to enterprises or conference organizers.
- I suspect that most of them are ghost towns.
- None of them that I've seen actually try to originate events- i.e. the only way you would use them is if you try to organize an event or are invited to one through a different channel.
- Most of them are top-down, although there are a few 3d ones.
I still think that there's a lot of potential for someone to come in and take over this whole space with a product more polished than is possible in the browser, and with a social element that can drive usage of the platform (similar to Clubhouse). I suspect that the winning team will come from the ranks of game developers, not webdevs who cracked open a webrtc tutorial one weekend. For now though, it's probably best to sit back and let the majority of the 18 existing teams burn through their funding.
>I was interested in building something like this when COVID-19 first hit.
Same here. I spent a panicked month and a half on full-time pre-production for a competing product in this space, as an unfortunate alternative to seeking a job at the time.
>There are currently at least 18 projects operating in this space.
https://theonline.town/ is missing from your list. There's probably half a dozen more I could add if my notes from the time were properly organized.
Please don't feel bad of course: we've reached a point where full quantification of all non-stealth competitors in a busy space is very difficult, if not impossible. Indeed, your list has projects I was previously unaware of.
>I think it's still a space with a lot of potential, but there are now a huge number of competitors.
The number of competitors was staggering. It felt like a veritable gold rush: almost every single novel design concept I came up with was eventually independently thought of, but nobody ever wove each together into something truly cohesive. Heck, even the name was jokingly thought of by some random person on Twitter months later.
>I still think that there's a lot of potential for someone to come in and take over this whole space with a product more polished than is possible in the browser,
I don't think the browser as a platform is an issue; it's extremely capable. There's just a huge amount of apathy and entrenchment in that space now, and the usual rules pertaining to software moats apply just the same. It'd have to be something really special to unseat Zoom and all its clones at this point.
>I suspect that the winning team will come from the ranks of game developers, not webdevs who cracked open a webrtc tutorial one weekend
Having watched endless projects borne of weekend WebRTC tutorials spring up during that time period, I cannot agree more.
There are competitors but our focus is on making sure people are able to build highly personalized spaces. The experience is vastly different than others.
Does anybody remember Habbo Hotel from a decade ago? Second Life and There? These all appear to be rehashes - of course with the video conferencing aspect but not at all profound in dynamic/immersive voice communication. These platforms used to be massive. I'm not sure if they were ever able to manage unicorn levels of monetization unfortunately.
An aside, I think these projects are awesome, this one included, and I really enjoyed those social games then. Will be following how this develops closely.
> I suspect that the winning team will come from the ranks of game developers, not webdevs who cracked open a webrtc tutorial one weekend.
I hope it will be two teams. The first will be the devs who build a free SDK to make building such things really easy. Think mediasoup but w/ all the rooms, permissions, servers, state management, etc easy to build with via API. The second team will garner adoption by putting in the effort into putting those pieces together and running/moderating the thing.
Mozilla Hubs is the best 3d browser-based spatial audio platform I've tried yet by far. I hosted a virtual party in the first lockdown back in April and it was pretty fun and far far better than a zoom call due to the spacial audio. Unfortunately it did become a bit unstable past 15-18 people and you'd have to rejoin the session frequently when it started to crap out under higher load.
There already is a popular platform that fits what you are describing: VRChat.
Thanks for posting this list! As it happens I am working on organizing a conference in the coming months and I've been comparing a few similar platforms but there are several on your list and in the comments that I didn't know about.
If anyone has attended a conference recently using one of these platforms I'd love to hear how it went.
We actually are working on a broadcast feature so that you can have speakers talk across rooms. And people can still interact with each other. If you will be interested in trying it out, let me know.
There are currently at least 18 projects operating in this space.
- The majority (maybe all?) of them are browser-based (probably because it's easy to throw something together with all the JS webrtc example projects out there).
- Most of them seem to be trying to sell to enterprises or conference organizers.
- I suspect that most of them are ghost towns.
- None of them that I've seen actually try to originate events- i.e. the only way you would use them is if you try to organize an event or are invited to one through a different channel.
- Most of them are top-down, although there are a few 3d ones.
I still think that there's a lot of potential for someone to come in and take over this whole space with a product more polished than is possible in the browser, and with a social element that can drive usage of the platform (similar to Clubhouse). I suspect that the winning team will come from the ranks of game developers, not webdevs who cracked open a webrtc tutorial one weekend. For now though, it's probably best to sit back and let the majority of the 18 existing teams burn through their funding.