Like gather.town but friendlier and less 90s-looking?
November 8, 2020 9:29 PM Subscribe
A friend and I were lamenting (while playing a game with very good positional audio) that it would be so nice to have features like that for the kind of family socialization that happens awkwardly via Zoom/Skype/etc these days. Aside from gather.town and Mozilla Hubs, are there other options?
We were playing ARMA3 with the ACRE2 mod. ACRE2 uses positional data from the game to simulate a lot of communications stuff, but the most basic feature is "peoples' voices appear to come from their game avatar as heard by your avatar, with appropriate stereo cues and volume that falls off with distance." This is nice for social banter because you can have multiple simultaneous conversations at once, and move between them by walking around in the game.
This is so pleasant compared to most video/voice chat I'm familiar with, where there's no concept of space/position and everyone is always equally loud at all times. It's impossible to have a quiet conversation with a few people, or two simultaneous conversations, or really, anything other than one giant conversation + maybe some text backchannel.
Clearly, we're not going to ask our non-milsim-nerd friends and relatives to buy a gaming computer capable of running an old deep-nerd game, learn how to launch it with mods, learn the idioms of FPS movement control, and then stand around talking on a simulated Greek island while looking like all-male members of Future-NATO. That's a bad idea on so many levels.
Gather.town is a great concept, but it was really hard for me to to explain isometric avatar-based chat to my wife, so I'm pretty sure it wouldn't go over well with our extended families. The movement is clunky and the avatars are customizable enough that you can't ignore them and have to explain them, but not so customizable as to capture the diversity of people one might want to include. Also it just feels so late-90s, visually. That resonates with me, personally, as someone who was Very Online in the late 90s, but apparently doesn't quite work for people without that existing background.
Mozilla Hubs goes too far in the direction of Second Life in terms of 3d graphics and uncanny-valley avatars (and Second Life is just a big nope for several reasons, including that the positional audio implementation is pretty lackluster, compared to ACRE, etc). I'm not sure if I want 3d or not. Seeing a first-person perspective seems like it might help a user understand what's going on with the audio more intuitively ("Okay, Andy's over there..") but at the same time, relies on users having some knowledge of how to move and interact in 3d space in games, which is a learned skill that many people don't have. On the other hand, understanding what's going on with stereo cues in a 2d/isometric/overhead view feels more challenging (and how would you solve UI like 'turning in place' in a way that's easy to explain? The mind boggles!)
I'd hack together something myself, but it seems like positional audio in WebRTC is a pile of semi-functional hacks, and while I could probably build a simple Unity game that does what I want, several relatives I'd want to share it with mostly communicate via their smartphones, and are not at the level of sophistication where "side-load this APK" is something I can ask them to do.
In general, it seems like the people who most need new tools for online socializing are the people who are least familiar with the existing tools, and have the least tools already addressing their needs. That sucks. I'd like to help, or find something I can share that helps. Bah.
Is there anything else out there I should know about? For the record, I'm specifically looking for services that include positional audio and run on at least desktop and Android -- I'm well aware of Discord / Teamspeak / Jitsi Meet / Slack / Teams / etc.
We were playing ARMA3 with the ACRE2 mod. ACRE2 uses positional data from the game to simulate a lot of communications stuff, but the most basic feature is "peoples' voices appear to come from their game avatar as heard by your avatar, with appropriate stereo cues and volume that falls off with distance." This is nice for social banter because you can have multiple simultaneous conversations at once, and move between them by walking around in the game.
This is so pleasant compared to most video/voice chat I'm familiar with, where there's no concept of space/position and everyone is always equally loud at all times. It's impossible to have a quiet conversation with a few people, or two simultaneous conversations, or really, anything other than one giant conversation + maybe some text backchannel.
Clearly, we're not going to ask our non-milsim-nerd friends and relatives to buy a gaming computer capable of running an old deep-nerd game, learn how to launch it with mods, learn the idioms of FPS movement control, and then stand around talking on a simulated Greek island while looking like all-male members of Future-NATO. That's a bad idea on so many levels.
Gather.town is a great concept, but it was really hard for me to to explain isometric avatar-based chat to my wife, so I'm pretty sure it wouldn't go over well with our extended families. The movement is clunky and the avatars are customizable enough that you can't ignore them and have to explain them, but not so customizable as to capture the diversity of people one might want to include. Also it just feels so late-90s, visually. That resonates with me, personally, as someone who was Very Online in the late 90s, but apparently doesn't quite work for people without that existing background.
Mozilla Hubs goes too far in the direction of Second Life in terms of 3d graphics and uncanny-valley avatars (and Second Life is just a big nope for several reasons, including that the positional audio implementation is pretty lackluster, compared to ACRE, etc). I'm not sure if I want 3d or not. Seeing a first-person perspective seems like it might help a user understand what's going on with the audio more intuitively ("Okay, Andy's over there..") but at the same time, relies on users having some knowledge of how to move and interact in 3d space in games, which is a learned skill that many people don't have. On the other hand, understanding what's going on with stereo cues in a 2d/isometric/overhead view feels more challenging (and how would you solve UI like 'turning in place' in a way that's easy to explain? The mind boggles!)
I'd hack together something myself, but it seems like positional audio in WebRTC is a pile of semi-functional hacks, and while I could probably build a simple Unity game that does what I want, several relatives I'd want to share it with mostly communicate via their smartphones, and are not at the level of sophistication where "side-load this APK" is something I can ask them to do.
In general, it seems like the people who most need new tools for online socializing are the people who are least familiar with the existing tools, and have the least tools already addressing their needs. That sucks. I'd like to help, or find something I can share that helps. Bah.
Is there anything else out there I should know about? For the record, I'm specifically looking for services that include positional audio and run on at least desktop and Android -- I'm well aware of Discord / Teamspeak / Jitsi Meet / Slack / Teams / etc.
try http://www.borrel.app
Signing up UX is a bit complicated (in the sense that you get a link to your email). But once you got a link to your space, you share that link & can meet with up to 12 people (for free) in a space.
I use it with my team for afterwork drinks and stuff, because it allows us to have one-on-one conversations instead of needing to have 8ppl constantly wait for eachother to stop talking.
It works best in Chrome I believe.
posted by Thisandthat at 1:10 PM on November 9, 2020
Signing up UX is a bit complicated (in the sense that you get a link to your email). But once you got a link to your space, you share that link & can meet with up to 12 people (for free) in a space.
I use it with my team for afterwork drinks and stuff, because it allows us to have one-on-one conversations instead of needing to have 8ppl constantly wait for eachother to stop talking.
It works best in Chrome I believe.
posted by Thisandthat at 1:10 PM on November 9, 2020
There's spatial.chat, which works well with video and positional audio, but it's pricey for all but the smallest groups.
posted by egregious theorem at 8:15 PM on November 9, 2020
posted by egregious theorem at 8:15 PM on November 9, 2020
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by nat at 10:33 PM on November 8, 2020 [1 favorite]