Partying over Internet: Technological Aspects
250bpm.comI've been thinking about this too. In fact I've started hacking on an app to solve this for my group of friends. To me the two primary issues are:
1. Sub groups without losing the context of the full group. I want to focus on a set of people and chat with them while also aware of what other groups are around. I want to be able to bring people into these groups at will. This also adds a gamification aspect where you can adjust groups, i.e. randomly mix, mix people who haven't talked to each other yet etc.
2. Multi monitor. I want to see everyone and real estate is limited on a single screen. I should be able to add multiple windows or computers to my chat and have everyone spread across those windows. Only one window / computer will submit video and audio for me though.
There was a jit.si post on here where someone made a 2d map. If you were standing close to them on the map you heard the if voice. Further away people were ignored.
If I remember right there was an app from the early 2000s that did something kind of like this. It would be cool to combine the 2D map with a speech-to-text word cloud over clusters of people so you could see if you wanted to join another conversation.
Mumble has positional audio for game stuff - https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Positional-Audio its also extremely low resource usage and you can install/manage it yourself.
I really prefer it to discord/whatever other voice client because you can also do stuff like hierarchical broadcasting, a parent channel can broadcast to children without children broadcasting back.
There are a few Minecraft mods that implement this kind of behavior, and I could swear I saw it baked into a shooter game somewhere but I can't remember which one.
Not exactly a shooter game, but Second Life has had this feature for a while based on Vivox and OpenAL (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Voice/Technical).
What if your chatting was also at a lower volume for other groups so if one group organically disbands, can pre-hear what some groups are talking about to join in. Feels like a pretty natural experience in social gatherings.
>Sub groups without losing the context of the full group.
Different 'rooms'? You could keep the video tiles for all people on screen organized by room, then the individual chooses which one to join for audio. You could include a push-to-talk 'announce' button to send your audio to all rooms in addition to the normal open mic in the room you belong to at that time.
I picture a mosaic of webcam feeds that have border lines drawn to indicate group members.
We’ve been running “dial up dance parties” in Phoenix for the last few weeks. A DJ streams music to a zoom hangout, and people dance in front of their camera. The magic bit is that there is a new curation job beyond djing: curating who is be “spotlighted” at the current time. So my and my wife’s job (we have been organizing and promoting these parties) is to watch all of the participants and pick out who should get spotlighted.
It’s been a LOT of fun and has been growing quickly. Our last party had about 40 people in it and every time we do it we know fewer of the people who show up.
Something like http://kosmi.io or a different Rabb.it successor may fit better than Zoom. Many of the DJs in my circle have also been trying out Twitch for this purpose.
Cool idea! I am fascinated that this is growing. I wouldn't have guessed so in the first place.
Is there interaction happening between the participants?
> every time we do it we know fewer of the people who show up.
This sounds like the retention rate is low, or is this a wrong conclusion?
Also I would be interested to learn for whom this is fun, and why.
> This sounds like the retention rate is low, or is this a wrong conclusion?
I think they mean that the percentage of their close friends goes down each time, as more people are invited. Network effect.
It means that every time we do it the network grows. It started with our friends, and now it’s our friends and their friends, and their friends and so on.
JQBX might be of interest to you. Let’s people dj Spotify playlists at the same time. So everyone can be on their own device, listening to their own music but all listening to the same song at the same time. Might help with timing/lag etc.
Cool concept! Are people paying to attend the event?
No, but the next task is to figure out how to let them tip the DJs.
There are two types of partying: raving and clubbing.
Clubbing, is for extroverts who enjoy socializing and being on the spotlight. Clubs have lots of lights, people dress in shiny colors and seek to bring attention to themselves. Camera sharing is the ideal format for this.
Raving, is for introverts. The setting is dark, people wear black and usually prefer to be left on their own and focus internally and in the music. It's a way to enjoy a social situation without being overwhelmed by the crowd. Avatars and virtual worlds is the ideal format for this.
Of course, I am generalizing here but I'm simply trying to make a point. An extrovert will not enjoy a setting where they can't draw attention to themselves. An introvert will not enjoy a setting where being in the spotlight is the default mode.
Speaking only by my own experience as being an introvert-extrovert and attending both clubs and raves I can tell you that there is minimal overlap in the crowds. A different type of people is in clubs and a different type of people is in raves. Generalizing both as "partying" is confusing, at least.
Well yes, and actually the OP is about even another kind. The article references a birthday party, which is more of a general social event vs a music or participatory/thematic event which is what you’re talking about. Interestingly, the dance club environment seems easier to elicit online than the birthday party. The birthday party is all about the social chit chat dynamics whereas the club environments have a primary focus on the music (even tho there’s plenty of other interactions as well). Online if you have faces + music, you have a dance party, or a decent facsimile.
OTOH, I, as an introvert, appreciate presence of extroverts at parties because they divert attention to themselves and thus create kind of sheltered zones around themselves, quite comfortable for introverts to be in.
As an introvert, I've found that I'm actually much more uncomfortable with group video chats than with interacting with people in person, in part because of the impossibility of escaping attention without that escape itself becoming obvious. I've had no such problems with voice chat, though.
Super interesting, thanks!
I’ve been doing zoom teleparties for a few weeks now and they’re really kind of magical. I started when I had to cancel one of my IRL dance parties and we thought we’d give it a go. As a meatspace party promoter and DJ i was really surprised at how successful these are, and how much of the real life party vibe translates. At our peak we had 160 or so zoom guests and you really felt that presence!
With the apps we have now social interactions are limited to chat and physical communication (lots of people will mirror folks’ movements, which is always a joy). There’s so much you can do.
I’ve got a ton of ideas and sketches for a real online party and event app — a kind of perfect blend of my UX life and my party life. I’d love to work on it if I could find some folks with web conferencing experience.
Consider using avatar chat, which has been shown to be able to deliver social presence, esp w VR.
https://extendedmind.io/blog/2020/3/20/video-conferencing-wo...
Example of a house party thrown in hubs: https://www.facebook.com/1365390312/posts/10216647011272117/...
I’m not familiar with avatar chat, but it does seem VR would solve some of the problems mentioned in the article (seeing the whole body, meaningful interactions, side conversations). The problem with VR is it’s not widely used at the moment. Maybe this will change as a result?
Yep many of the benefits can be delivered without a VR headset (that's part of the gist of my post) - worth checking out.
A lot of in-person interaction for groups is just not possible with most (all?) conferencing solutions, e.g., sidebar discussions. Some of this can be handled through texts (which are an occasional solution in in-person meetings as well—in grad school, I was occasionally in group texts mocking the person speaking to our class), although there's the danger that messages might pop up inopportunely while screen sharing (this happened to a co-worker of my wife's during a presentation once).
And of course, there's always this: "Leaving your mic on is the new reply-all."
Interesting problem. It would be partly solved by the look-and-look-back protocol, because then it's obvious that you are speaking to a single person. But then, it could still happen that you accidentally avert your gaze and drop back to the common chatroom, making what you are saying audible to everyone.
I enjoyed this a lot! It identified a problem and explored a couple of aspects of the solution. It's really fun to think about designing such a product. Even though there seem to be some technical roadblocks in the way, I would love to use an app like this!
I recently stumbled upon Airmeet[1]. It's not really for birthday parties, more like networking events. Still, I find the concept intriguing.
They offer a kind of socializing space. It is organized by virtual tables. Each table holds up to 4 participants via webcam. That way you do not have the typical issue of large zoom calls where only a few people can talk at a time. You get a lot smaller conversations much like a real networking event.
They seem to be still starting out, so there are a few issues. But I hope they iron them out. The concept seems really promising.
I'm really surprised no one has brought up VRChat. Though the hardware requirement may be a steeper barrier to entry, the software is free (non libre) and the experience is unlike any other
What I'd like in an online party platform is a shared social area divided into conversations you can join. This is for both social bandwidth and network bandwidth. In real life conversations naturally form and fork off into new ones.
This needs to be more than just separate channels for it to work well. There should be some bleeding of audio between adjacent conversations, and maybe some limited video. I'm thinking perhaps "avatars" of people that get updated once a minute with their current video feed so you can look around the shared social area and get an idea of what is going on and have some sort of shared atmosphere. Maybe a shared background music track?
Zoom's gallery view and pin video solves some of the problems with Hangouts discussed in the article. I like the idea of somehow building cabaceo into the app, although I think something simpler might be preferable (E.g. right-click on person, request to create breakout room.) I think Zoom kind of has this but it seems like only hosts can create break-out rooms, and they have to turn it on or something.
There's always Second Life
I should have mentioned that. How is that project going? I wrote the first physics engine 10 years ago.
It's under active development, including adding features to stay mostly compatible with Second Life. Bakes on mesh will probably be the next big feature. Firestorm is probably the most popular viewer. I think BulletSim is now the default physics engine. There are two grid-independent currency systems, Podex and Gloebits.
I heard somewhere that there are around 300 public grids, most of which are on the hypergrid. There are a few significant forks, most notably Halcyon (created by the late InWorldz LLC) but there are only a handful of grids running those.
We've been building this ;) will launch soon.
Your form didn't work for me :(
TurnTable Live was out briefly (after TurnTable.fm closed).
I always thought it had a really cool party atmosphere for concerts. Here's a video of a concert that I took. No audio, unfortunately.
TurnTable was awesome! Forgotten about it, thanks!
Edit: didn't know about Live, but the original[0] one, TurnTable.fm with the avatars was really a fantastic place to be in the Internet. So sad to see it end, but maybe someone can revive it?
A party app to fight the virus. https://ba.net/screen-share-party
Imagine if everybody wore head cams. You could end up with complex strange loops reflecting intimacy and eye contact of an inverted kind.