One of authors here. As a kid, some of my most meaningful relationships and experiences were forged through online gaming (UO anyone?). A big part of this wasn’t necessarily the game itself, but was instead the sense of place and community afforded through the shared environment.
As an adult, many of my most meaningful relationships have come from my work environment. When working remotely or in a distributed setting, however, I find this not to be the case. Existing tools such as Slack and Zoom simply don’t cut it. Individual productivity may benefit, but the culture is fundamentally lacking.
As a leader and someone who has founded and built a large company, I have experienced first-hand how critical it is to have a highly engaged team. This affects everything from communication to culture and company values. Moreover, there is a lack of innovation that spontaneous whiteboard sessions and more fluid communication styles afford.
Spot is the culmination of a year of research and development to recreate a highly engaged workplace with smooth and natural interactions. (Not to mention, it is also a lot of fun!). Would appreciate some feedback from the HN community.
I'd like to try this, but the "Try Now for Free!" button wants me to create an account - I don't want to create an account just to have a quick look. I'd much rather have a quick look, then maybe create an account later if I wanted to try it more meaningfully.
If you're an HN regular, I guess you were expecting a comment like this - is there an open URL we can use just to get a feel for it?
I was going to dismiss this as similar to a lot of other things I've seen, but hearing your POV helps a lot - as someone who has friends IRL that I met in UO, and a wife I met in EverQuest, your story really hits with me, thanks for this, I'm going to check it out.
I guess my main curiosity is how we get people who don't believe virtual communication/living is the same as in-person or at least capable of being socially fulfilling. Does Spot do anything special to attract the people who go in with cynicism?
Congrats on the launch. I have to ask though... how do you plan to differentiate? As I'm sure you are aware, there has been at least 25 (likely more) of these exact same web-based, 3D spaces platforms for remote work as an interactive alternative to Zoom. All launched since COVID, all offering pretty similar value propositions.
I'll be honest, I'm not a huge fan of the 3d virtual office. I find they often require a greater number of clicks to perform a task I'd otherwise complete "the old way". I'd be more likely to use an app that delivers "always on" virtual connections if they legitimately made my life easier. Maybe consider adding some desktop/keyboard shortcuts that are available when minimized/off?
<a bit of a plug coming up> We've been working on solving similar problems but going about it differently. Rather than a shared virtual environment, we're looking for better ways to connect real, distributed environments. We created https://sharetheboard.com because we simply didn't want to give up the whiteboard sessions. Reading here though I wonder if some kind of mashup wouldn't be interesting? A real whiteboard session could easily be displayed on the wall of your virtual office, allowing for serendipitous participation... Let me know if you're interested and we can discuss.
I do some work with games in the browser, both 2D and 3D, and did try it out mostly because I was curious about the technical side.
First, this looks like a cool idea and could be useful. But we are on Internet so going directly to the problems.
In both Firefox and Chrome on windows 10 the fps was mostly around 30 fps when moving around, some times dropping down to 5 fps. Probably because of this I kept getting stuck in furniture. There was also something that did feel off when looking around using the mouse, not really sure what maybe it only was lag. On most demos on Babylon and Three, and on other games, I get solid 60 fps. I am sure the experience will be much better if you also manage to get close to 60 fps.
Feel free to call me cynical, but do low level employees want systems like this? I've seen a few spacial chat systems pass through HN in the past few months. From a pure social application standpoint both spot and other options seem to be reasonably well executed, though it seems at odds with the natural flow of workplace interactions. I guess it might be a perceived lack of privacy in conversations? When talking to another individual in an online case it's generally either fully public or fully private. Having unexpected intrusions in something with the base mentality of being private seems unpleasant.
Personally given the corporate cultures I've been in using a spacial social chat environment feels like it would lead to rather forced interactions, unnatural intrusions, and micromanagement of execs seeing interactions as something to be mismanaged rather than an organic phenomena. When used in a purely social sense the tools seem great and plenty novel (due to lack of hierarchies and allowing multiple unrelated conversations to form and occur simultaneously), just not in the current application domain?
Who knows, perhaps I just have been dealing with orgs with bad culture, but I struggle to see the concept adopted well. Great looking execution though despite my reservations.
That is my feeling as well. The whole point of having colleagues in your physical space is so that you are in the same physical space. Having a virtual space in a background window does nothing for me.
I cannot see my teammates walking to the water cooler, I cannot see some teammates grouping up to discuss, I cannot give a sense of whether I'm interruptible or not. Because what we see are those avatars that do not reflect our current state at all.
3D spaces are fun and I'm very fond of games where I can pretend to do work. However I do not actually exist or work in there, and the moment I start doing actual work I stop role-playing my character around the game.
> Feel free to call me cynical, but do low level employees want systems like this?
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this – I previously founded an always-on video presence startup[1]. We were building for our own problem as founders, as is often the advice you get given! – However I think this is a case where founders are actually unique and what works for a group of 2-3 founding folks really does not scale well to a broader team at all. This is also what we saw with our product, it worked well for small tight-knit groups but rarely did teams above 10 adopt in a meaningful way.
The killer app here would be to license or safely mimic some classic office layouts: Mad Men, The Office, Silicon Valley, Parks and Rec. Or even the USS Enterprise.
Or, an “App Store” for interior designers and artists to sell office spaces and furnishings.
Disclaimer: I've joined Spot as a strategic/product advisor and consultant, and I'm very excited about the space, product and roadmap.
Working from home since late 2008 myself, I've felt the drawbacks extensively. So when I discovered Spot for the first time, I felt that this truly addressed many of the challenges of working from home. Some of these are the dilution of corporate culture, the loss of rituals and ceremonies, and the loss of chance encounters and spontaneous conversations with coworkers. People working from home over long periods of time tend to feel increasingly more disconnected and unseen.
Location and presence can be powerful enablers and are great ways to communicate what's happening in a team, resulting in richer social interaction. I can imagine how nice it is for a team to see who's in the meeting room right now, or who is hanging out in the lounge area and likely up for some small talk. I can see how that would make me feel more connected than just staring at a bunch of channels or joining video calls.
I'm especially excited about the greater long-range potential of a powerful spatial interface to communication and collaboration. There are many things and nuances we are paying very close attention to in order to bridge the gaps and make it feel as natural as possible.
Another aspect I like a lot here is that the design of the space to which you invite people conveys something about who you are as a company and team. I remember getting invited to Dropbox HQ a few times and the space itself had a personality to it that I liked a lot. I can imagine inviting clients and letting them arrive in a virtual lobby with photos on the walls highlighting some really cool things about our product or so, and then picking them up to walk through our virtual space to the meeting room while telling them about the features our engineers are currently working on as we pass their desks.
There are a lot of virtual office tools out there (I'm not affiliated with any so I feel comfortable asking this question). What makes Spot compelling vs. the alternatives? And if the main difference is 3D, how have you leveraged that to create a differentiated experience?
1. 3D is definitely a differentiator, but we consider it more of an implementation detail. It does come with some really cool stuff like the ability to have a first-person view (really neat to be able to give a presentation in FP). A 3D interface affords a lot of really fun ways to interact with emotes and things and we have beta support for things like wearables.
2. We are investing a lot in asynchronous modes of communication. Our chat system is already pretty robust (easily drag drop files, reactions, etc.) but we also have some big plans here.
3. Customizable and programmability are first-class citizens. Everything is totally customizable in real-time within the same experience. We also envision this as a completely programmable world. Slack is really powerful because of its integrations, but we think having a spatial interface like this actually unlocks some super interesting things. (e.g. imagine updating having your CI build change the color of a light on a desk somewhere).
Seems like a good spot to comment that I've been tossing around a similar idea, but related to creating personal spaces instead.
Context: we moved into a much smaller house a few years back and I miss having a room dedicated to shelves, both for books and for music. But most of my reading and listening has moved to digital anyway, so there's really no need for such a space anyway. But it would be amazing to have a digital rendition of such a space, particularly if it could be done in VR. Ideally would tie in with APIs such as Goodreads or Spotify, so you could visualise your digital library in a physical space.
And like with haram_masala's comment [0] about having some "classic office layouts", this would do the same but with classic libraries or record stores.
I tried signing up and I got a collection of most useless error messages, such as Unauthorized, Forbidden, Email is in use and so on. The Email is in use one does not seem so useless, but it really is if you get it when you try again with the same email address after getting one of the other messages...
Not trying to discourage you, but if they are indeed similar, I don't think Sococo has been much successful and they seem to have been trying this for more than 10-12 years if not more.
I've been following similar products for a while now and the main problem with them I find is that they all are made by people who are not related to game industry but try to create a gaming experience. As a result they all look very basic, with at best average UX and visuals. I am not trying being negative here, just my observations.
I'd really love to see a take on such product from an experienced game dev team.
I’ve tried this sort of thing at a previous employer. In short, this is skeuomorphism raised to … some large power.
Focusing on the looks of whether or not we’re in the right virtual space unfortunately detracts from the actual communications themselves.
We don’t need to rebuild a full 3d virtual office where everyone has a personal avatar to wander around the space, in order to communicate with our office mates. If you want that, just go build your office in Second Life.
But keep in mind that there’s a reason why Second Life doesn’t have a population of hundreds of millions of people — that concept doesn’t scale, and there are many of us who actively avoid 3D MMOs.
I understand the appeal of emulating physical space in terms of people's ability to understand it, but what I don't get is:
1. Couldn't everything be expressed more easily in 2D
2. Would living in this for long time feel like a simulacrum that gets depressing after a while?
There are so many videos out there mocking the WFH experience and the loneliness and dehumanizing elements that literally making your entire work experience from a virtual physical world further and further distance ourselves to being overly siloed and non-social creatures? Even if features make remote work better (I haven't actually used it), it seems to me to be missing the point when going in this direction at all.
Got "Unauthorized" message when trying to sign up, switch to Chrome (was using Firefox) then said my email was in use. Tried to reset but nothing happens (console errors showing 401 errors).
Use something similar to this (gather.town) just this week for a virtual conference. You can walk right up to people in the expo and start video chatting etc... Seems like a good use-case for this.
Thanks for the feedback. Yeah we have plans to add "nearby conversations" in larger rooms, built around furniture. So walking over to a couch in the room would start a nearby conversation that wouldn't disturb the rest of the room.
You can't insist on a signup for a demo of your product. 3/4 of your visitors will just click back. Myself included. There's no way I'm receiving junk mail for 50 years.
The "Start now for free" button triggers my 'dubious payment schema' sense. How does this scale with more members? What does the pricing plan look like?
[+] [-] ghempton|4 years ago|reply
As an adult, many of my most meaningful relationships have come from my work environment. When working remotely or in a distributed setting, however, I find this not to be the case. Existing tools such as Slack and Zoom simply don’t cut it. Individual productivity may benefit, but the culture is fundamentally lacking.
As a leader and someone who has founded and built a large company, I have experienced first-hand how critical it is to have a highly engaged team. This affects everything from communication to culture and company values. Moreover, there is a lack of innovation that spontaneous whiteboard sessions and more fluid communication styles afford.
Spot is the culmination of a year of research and development to recreate a highly engaged workplace with smooth and natural interactions. (Not to mention, it is also a lot of fun!). Would appreciate some feedback from the HN community.
[+] [-] GordonS|4 years ago|reply
If you're an HN regular, I guess you were expecting a comment like this - is there an open URL we can use just to get a feel for it?
[+] [-] codezero|4 years ago|reply
I guess my main curiosity is how we get people who don't believe virtual communication/living is the same as in-person or at least capable of being socially fulfilling. Does Spot do anything special to attract the people who go in with cynicism?
[+] [-] astlouis44|4 years ago|reply
Why should anyone use this over a competitor?
[+] [-] technoplato|4 years ago|reply
What’s going to be the pricing model moving forward. Surely voice and such can’t be free in perpetuity.
Nice work!
[+] [-] marcind|4 years ago|reply
<a bit of a plug coming up> We've been working on solving similar problems but going about it differently. Rather than a shared virtual environment, we're looking for better ways to connect real, distributed environments. We created https://sharetheboard.com because we simply didn't want to give up the whiteboard sessions. Reading here though I wonder if some kind of mashup wouldn't be interesting? A real whiteboard session could easily be displayed on the wall of your virtual office, allowing for serendipitous participation... Let me know if you're interested and we can discuss.
[+] [-] rypskar|4 years ago|reply
First, this looks like a cool idea and could be useful. But we are on Internet so going directly to the problems.
In both Firefox and Chrome on windows 10 the fps was mostly around 30 fps when moving around, some times dropping down to 5 fps. Probably because of this I kept getting stuck in furniture. There was also something that did feel off when looking around using the mouse, not really sure what maybe it only was lag. On most demos on Babylon and Three, and on other games, I get solid 60 fps. I am sure the experience will be much better if you also manage to get close to 60 fps.
[+] [-] frijole|4 years ago|reply
https://topia.io/
[+] [-] tunnuz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] christkv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boobsbr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petersonh|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fundamental|4 years ago|reply
Personally given the corporate cultures I've been in using a spacial social chat environment feels like it would lead to rather forced interactions, unnatural intrusions, and micromanagement of execs seeing interactions as something to be mismanaged rather than an organic phenomena. When used in a purely social sense the tools seem great and plenty novel (due to lack of hierarchies and allowing multiple unrelated conversations to form and occur simultaneously), just not in the current application domain?
Who knows, perhaps I just have been dealing with orgs with bad culture, but I struggle to see the concept adopted well. Great looking execution though despite my reservations.
[+] [-] remram|4 years ago|reply
I cannot see my teammates walking to the water cooler, I cannot see some teammates grouping up to discuss, I cannot give a sense of whether I'm interruptible or not. Because what we see are those avatars that do not reflect our current state at all.
3D spaces are fun and I'm very fond of games where I can pretend to do work. However I do not actually exist or work in there, and the moment I start doing actual work I stop role-playing my character around the game.
[+] [-] tommoor|4 years ago|reply
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this – I previously founded an always-on video presence startup[1]. We were building for our own problem as founders, as is often the advice you get given! – However I think this is a case where founders are actually unique and what works for a group of 2-3 founding folks really does not scale well to a broader team at all. This is also what we saw with our product, it worked well for small tight-knit groups but rarely did teams above 10 adopt in a meaningful way.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/11/sqwiggle-makes-working-rem...
[+] [-] haram_masala|4 years ago|reply
Or, an “App Store” for interior designers and artists to sell office spaces and furnishings.
[+] [-] andrewmcwatters|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waynecochran|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frbr|4 years ago|reply
Working from home since late 2008 myself, I've felt the drawbacks extensively. So when I discovered Spot for the first time, I felt that this truly addressed many of the challenges of working from home. Some of these are the dilution of corporate culture, the loss of rituals and ceremonies, and the loss of chance encounters and spontaneous conversations with coworkers. People working from home over long periods of time tend to feel increasingly more disconnected and unseen.
Location and presence can be powerful enablers and are great ways to communicate what's happening in a team, resulting in richer social interaction. I can imagine how nice it is for a team to see who's in the meeting room right now, or who is hanging out in the lounge area and likely up for some small talk. I can see how that would make me feel more connected than just staring at a bunch of channels or joining video calls.
I'm especially excited about the greater long-range potential of a powerful spatial interface to communication and collaboration. There are many things and nuances we are paying very close attention to in order to bridge the gaps and make it feel as natural as possible.
Another aspect I like a lot here is that the design of the space to which you invite people conveys something about who you are as a company and team. I remember getting invited to Dropbox HQ a few times and the space itself had a personality to it that I liked a lot. I can imagine inviting clients and letting them arrive in a virtual lobby with photos on the walls highlighting some really cool things about our product or so, and then picking them up to walk through our virtual space to the meeting room while telling them about the features our engineers are currently working on as we pass their desks.
[+] [-] Fission|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghempton|4 years ago|reply
2. We are investing a lot in asynchronous modes of communication. Our chat system is already pretty robust (easily drag drop files, reactions, etc.) but we also have some big plans here.
3. Customizable and programmability are first-class citizens. Everything is totally customizable in real-time within the same experience. We also envision this as a completely programmable world. Slack is really powerful because of its integrations, but we think having a spatial interface like this actually unlocks some super interesting things. (e.g. imagine updating having your CI build change the color of a light on a desk somewhere).
[+] [-] have_faith|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] photojosh|4 years ago|reply
Context: we moved into a much smaller house a few years back and I miss having a room dedicated to shelves, both for books and for music. But most of my reading and listening has moved to digital anyway, so there's really no need for such a space anyway. But it would be amazing to have a digital rendition of such a space, particularly if it could be done in VR. Ideally would tie in with APIs such as Goodreads or Spotify, so you could visualise your digital library in a physical space.
And like with haram_masala's comment [0] about having some "classic office layouts", this would do the same but with classic libraries or record stores.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27387881
[+] [-] astlouis44|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfoucher|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghempton|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yumraj|4 years ago|reply
https://www.sococo.com/
Not trying to discourage you, but if they are indeed similar, I don't think Sococo has been much successful and they seem to have been trying this for more than 10-12 years if not more.
[+] [-] risyachka|4 years ago|reply
I'd really love to see a take on such product from an experienced game dev team.
[+] [-] Jommi|4 years ago|reply
https://github.com/billmei/every-proximity-chat-app
Who will win?
[+] [-] drivingmenuts|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astlouis44|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kissgyorgy|4 years ago|reply
It even has a first person view, wow!
[+] [-] bradknowles|4 years ago|reply
Focusing on the looks of whether or not we’re in the right virtual space unfortunately detracts from the actual communications themselves.
We don’t need to rebuild a full 3d virtual office where everyone has a personal avatar to wander around the space, in order to communicate with our office mates. If you want that, just go build your office in Second Life.
But keep in mind that there’s a reason why Second Life doesn’t have a population of hundreds of millions of people — that concept doesn’t scale, and there are many of us who actively avoid 3D MMOs.
[+] [-] azinman2|4 years ago|reply
1. Couldn't everything be expressed more easily in 2D
2. Would living in this for long time feel like a simulacrum that gets depressing after a while?
There are so many videos out there mocking the WFH experience and the loneliness and dehumanizing elements that literally making your entire work experience from a virtual physical world further and further distance ourselves to being overly siloed and non-social creatures? Even if features make remote work better (I haven't actually used it), it seems to me to be missing the point when going in this direction at all.
[+] [-] tossaway9000|4 years ago|reply
Just me or did Hackernews hug the site to death?
[+] [-] kuroguro|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avsteele|4 years ago|reply
Not quite like being there, but pretty fun.
[+] [-] whather|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threshold|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smoldesu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobsmooth|4 years ago|reply