Show HN: Free 3D virtual office in the browser | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Free 3D virtual office in the browser

spot.xyz

125 pointsghempton100 comments

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 surprisingly love using these kinds of environments and this one looks neat.

What’s going to be the pricing model moving forward. Surely voice and such can’t be free in perpetuity.

Nice work!

Good question! Right now we are fortunate to have some AWS credits to subsidize some voice costs :P. At the moment our focus is on usage, but our goal is to have a freemium model based on the size of the space, premium assets, etc.

AWS will jack you, be careful. Those credits get used up, free/cheap quota used, services grind to a halt and somehow you owe $500 after a week.

I mean.. you just have to pay attention. And maybe think about making a pricing page.

Personally I love the idea, especially 3D and programmability.

If you want to be „close” to AWS but still save money, try spinning lightsail instances that act as media proxies, similarly with other more resource generous providers. You could shift majority of media traffic off AWS and keep the “signalling” just there.

I'm definitively going to propose we try it to see if it makes interactions better for our case.

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?

Account creation doesn't require clicking a link in the email, I just used 'buttmonkey' as the username and 'buttmonkey@mailinator.com' as the email.

And now I am stuck in the tutorial because it wants me to zoom in and out with the mouse wheel or the track pad, and I am at my desk with my computer closed and plugged into my monitor and my Wacom tablet and it doesn't recognize using the touch ring set to 'scroll'. It's sure not doing a good job of suppressing Safari's right-click menus when I hit the stylus button I have set to right-click to rotate the view, either.

I think they shut down Mailinator emails (tried Mailismagic and mailinator and both times I was "unauthorized")

Wow, that's some pretty disappointing behaviour if true. Since at leat one of the authors is here, would be good to get a comment from them on this?

Mailinator still works. The homepage doesn't suggest emails anymore but there's a box at the top of the page for whatever fake email you want to check.

Sorry this was a sendgrid issue that has now been fixed

Is opening the computer a possibility?

It's under the desk, hidden away.

Seconded, I would like to have a look but I won't give out my email without researching who you are more thoroughly. And I can't "Try Now..." if I have to go spend time researching before I try it.

And I don't think using a fake or alternative email is an option.

^ this. I was excited to try it out, but there is no wayI create an account just to take a quick look. I am 99% sure this will not work for me and my team, but I wanted to just check, maybe show it to my team. This needs no registration demo.

Yes, UO. Catskills shard.

Napa valley here.

Lake Superior

Great Lakes! I had a GM Tamer back in '97.

Sonoma!

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.

Why should anyone use this over a competitor?

I see this question asked a lot on HN, and certainly with good reason: Every founder should be constantly asking themselves this question. However, I think it’s important to also play Devil’s Advocate and note that some products succeed not because they differentiated themselves against competitors, but simply because a large number of people learned about them before learning about their (possibly better, possibly cheaper) competitors, and then network effects start to take over from there.

I've tried a bunch of solutions like this and think the answer is that Spot.xyz is the richest (but still simple) experience.

Here's my summary:

* The world is easy to move around in and manipulate, which is rare for a 3d space (as opposed to Mozilla Hubs for example)

* Video chat showing up on peoples heads is much nicer than in a separate section like Gather.town

* Hear people per-room, rather than just volume attenuation is a better solution for larger meetings

* The screen sharing on a wall is such a nice and intuitive way to glimpse content from afar but still be able to full screen it

That said, my team is on Gather and we will stick, largely because we have team members on slow laptops and the 3d world of Spot makes the fans spin.

Would love your thoughts on my attempt at this space, jel.app, if you have time!

It’s 3D but is designed to run well on low end laptops. It incorporates UX patterns from Slack and Notion and has full world building (voxels) and friendly avatars with lip syncing based on voice. No webcam used, on purpose. It does presume some basic gaming literacy.

(I started the Hubs team at Mozilla and Jel is a derivative work from Hubs)

Your last sentence is really why I'm always bearish on all these 3d platforms.

We are just barely able to do these concurrent chats on 2d, mostly because of advancements on stuff like webRTC.

3d is going to be at least 10 years out - and at that point ubiquitous VR/AR might already be a thing.

I spent my adolescence on Ultima Online and don’t regret a single day. I now recognize it was a problem.

I know it's probably just remembering things better than they were but UO was some kind of magic- it was one of the last times that mmos forced players with a wide variety of playstyles to interact with real consequences in the same world. Shortly thereafter things split into specialized PvP and PvE mmos and it was never the same.

Curious of your thoughts on Topia, similar but geared for office work, community building, and commercial worlds.

https://topia.io/

CEO of Topia here - hi!

We're 100% focused on communities and human connection, not on office work or commercial tools :). But work employees can be a community as well and strengthening the bonds you have with your coworkers is a great use of Topia!

Topia is all about creating real relationships built upon shared experiences and memories. We have tons of fun features to help world builders create unique, connective experiences.

Wow, this person asked for information, and instead they got a fluff piece.

Was this an automated post made to any mention of Topia?

What did you want them to say? CEO explained what the company does.

Check out https://topia.io/ycombinator

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.

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.

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.

This is where it gets interesting, because many of the things you've mentioned are things that we're spending a lot of time on thinking through.

At the moment Spot has "headphones mode" which signals to others that you prefer not to be interrupted. It also temporarily mutes notifications and other things, just like putting on real headphones in real life would. We're very conscious of these things, and coming from UI/UX research I believe it's paying attention to these fine details that add up to a great product overall.

If I have to step into that virtual space and put my headphones on/off it is probably not in sync most of the time. Most people won't consistently remember/spend time letting your app know what social clues to give to other people. This is the entire advantage of those clues.

And if I do spend the time, why not put me in the "available for chat" Discord room or similar? What's the advantage of turning those explicit status settings back into subtle social clues in a virtual 3D world, other than making things complicated for coworkers?

An interesting hypothesis. Maybe the deeper question is, does the virtual world really need to reflect the physical world in a very accurate way, or does it suffice to represent a subset of that? And then, how accurate does it have to be? Does it map 1:1 or are there indirections that would work well to convey meaningful information and trigger actions that make sense?

I guess many important clues get provided implicitly. For some reason you want to mute notifications for a while, so you do that, and your avatar reflects it, but it may not be necessary to truly be in headphones mode whenever you happen to be wearing headphones, or vice-versa.

Our goal is to simplify things and avoid artificial complexity wherever possible.

Did you consider that a tree list that people call "rooms" might be a sufficient subset already?

> 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.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/11/sqwiggle-makes-working-rem...

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.

Imagine getting fired by your boss who has a cow for a head as his hat.

I notice the witch is in a room by herself.

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).

1. Many of them are 3D, that is not a differentiator in the slightest.

2. Again, these features are already prevalent or under active development by many of your competitors.

3.Also not novel.

In fairness, would you mind referencing some of the similar services?

https://github.com/billmei/every-proximity-chat-app

Don’t forget vrland.io

I guess now you can literally sell "seats" in your licenses.

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.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27387881

Check out vrland.io, we’re working on this!

Nice. Do you have any more info online on where you're trying to head with it? My initial reaction is that it's aimed at social interaction first, and modelling the space 2nd, whereas I was thinking of the other way around.

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...

Thanks for the feedback. Any other details you feel ok sharing about how you signed up? Was this using oauth?

No, email signup, using both fake and real email addresses.

BTW sorry for the snark in my original comment, but I got slightly annoyed I have to admit.

Hi, not who you asked but I didn't want to sign up.

I'm replying because a video overview would go a long way to explaining/demonstrating your idea. Not everyone wants the ordeal of signup to see what it's gonna look like.

Hope this helps.

There is a video on how spot looks like available on this page https://www.spot.xyz/blog/introducing-spot/

We just fixed this.

Looks very similar to Sococo, no?

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.

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.

One more to add to the list:

https://github.com/billmei/every-proximity-chat-app

Who will win?

I feel like the team behind The Sims games have missed a huge opportunity here.

Check out vrland.io

This is insanely nice! Well done! I was thinking exactly something like this a couple of months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25726331

It even has a first person view, wow!

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).

Just me or did Hackernews hug the site to death?

Same, reloaded the page after the error and got in.

Thanks, that worked, if I had not seen this message I might have forgotten about this and never returned.

Sorry all - was an issue with Sendgrid, but we have it fixed now.

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.

Not quite like being there, but pretty fun.

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?

Neat that you can share your desktop natively in the browser.

"For the best Spot experience, we recommend using Google Chrome on a non-mobile device." And what do you recommend on mobile device?

A mobile device is not recommended.

Vrland.io works on mobile devices via mobile web. Also works in VR.

For some reason, this made me remember VRML and all the excitement that surrounded it 25 years ago.

This is super nice. I've been looking for something like this. When working remote I feel like we sometimes miss out on visual cues which help us figure out what we should expect in terms of a response time if we have a question for someone

Is this built with Slack's Block Kit[1]? The interface looks very similar, and it's a welcome sight.

[1] https://api.slack.com/block-kit

Sorry all for the signup issues. A fix is going to be deployed in a few minutes. Sendgrid was giving us errors and we mistakenly had them in a codepath that was called synchronously.

Still signup issues. I got unauthorized, but then tried again, and said the email was taken.

Just fixed this, your original signup actually went through if you try to login with it.

I tried to sign up using my real name, real work email, and a strong password suggested by Edge, and I got red error text simply saying "Unauthorized". What does this mean?

Sorry this has been fixed. Your sign up most likely went through if you try and log back in with those same credentials.

Quite nice Thierry

We also do virtual visit but from photos https://free-visit.net/fr/demo01

Is this a different skin on the Sofya engine (https://sophya.world)?

I can't seem to find the 'Delete Account' function. Where is it hiding?

This reminds me of framevr.io Totally 3D with support for headsets and very expandable.

Vrland.io is like this too, supports VR and mobile. Best solution out there by far for 3D collaboration and virtual remote work.

Hire some game devs! The camera movement in particular could use some polish.

I had a similar idea last year, at the beginning of the Covid situation.

I envisioned something better looking, but it does not matter.

It does not feel exactly right, something is missing, but I can't put a finger on it.

here is what purports to be an invite link to the area I built for Buttmonkeys, Inc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

oh wait that's the url I tried to put in the video screen, the "copy invite" link isn't working for me on Safari, never mind

Reply on news.ycombinator.com