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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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?<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?
Seems like a good spot to comment that I've been tossing around a similar idea, but related to creating personal spaces instead.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27387881" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27387881</a>
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...
Looks very similar to Sococo, no?<p><a href="https://www.sococo.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.sococo.com/</a><p>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.
One more to add to the list:<p><a href="https://github.com/billmei/every-proximity-chat-app" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/billmei/every-proximity-chat-app</a><p>Who will win?
This is insanely nice! Well done! I was thinking exactly something like this a couple of months ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25726331" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25726331</a><p>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.<p>Focusing on the looks of whether or not we’re in the right virtual space unfortunately detracts from the actual communications themselves.<p>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.<p>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:<p>1. Couldn't everything be expressed more easily in 2D<p>2. Would living in this for long time feel like a simulacrum that gets depressing after a while?<p>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).<p>Just me or did Hackernews hug the site to death?
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.<p>Not quite like being there, but pretty fun.
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?
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.<p>[1] <a href="https://api.slack.com/block-kit" rel="nofollow">https://api.slack.com/block-kit</a>
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.
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?
Quite nice
Thierry<p>We also do virtual visit but from photos
<a href="https://free-visit.net/fr/demo01" rel="nofollow">https://free-visit.net/fr/demo01</a>
I had a similar idea last year, at the beginning of the Covid situation.<p>I envisioned something better looking, but it does not matter.<p>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<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ</a><p>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