Show HN: I built a new version of my fun spatial 3D online meeting app

ppawelwentpawel about 4 hours ago 48 commentsRead Article on flat.social

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Hi HN!

flat.social is a fun spatial online meeting app for remote teams and communities. It's largely built like a web multiplayer game, and the 3D virtual spaces are highly customisable with elements and activities (I recently added surfing!).

Live demo to try it out: https://app.flat.social/f/demo-flat

Here's a quick demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeinBNqL23s

It's a solo, bootstrapped project built with Three.js, LiveKit and Rapier for physics. I built the first version during the pandemic and posted it here back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31833415

I had a couple of months off this year, so I locked myself in an (almost) jungle house in Brazil and rebuilt it into what I've always wanted it to be.

Would love to hear what you think!

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

75% Positive

Analyzed from 1456 words in the discussion.

Discussion (48 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

hmokiguess•about 2 hours ago

I don't know man, I think I am not the right audience for this. I think online meetings are fine as is, I want to spend less time on them and more time connecting in real life.

I have been working remotely for a decade now, with fully remote teams, and we never felt the need for a deeper bonding in the form of work meetings that are more casual.

That said, if we want this kind of experience, online gaming already gives us that. I see lots of members of the team hanging out by discord and in gaming platforms.

Looks cool, but I don't want it. That's just my opinion.

sockpuppers•15 minutes ago

Is it appealing to people who like open plan offices?

We had to use Gather during covid, as a constant presence virtual office, all day long. It was an exhausting stream of endless distractions, the spatial audio meant people would just start randomly talking to you. But unless you had it pulled up on a monitor dedicated only to it, the real experience was a background tab of disembodied voices playing through your speakers at random, it was jarring and inhumane.

lopis•37 minutes ago

We tried a "fun" virtual office tool around covid times called Gather Town, which is 2D. People liked the virtual office, but only for certain company events like hackathons or meetups. The general audience totally prefers something like slack for texting and meeting.

We also had an issue with a few people getting motion sickness from any 3D games, so any 3D virtual meeting space was out of the question for our company. A flat 2D UI would be preferable to the "low performance" option that this project provides, which is quite jarring.

pawelwentpawel•32 minutes ago

The motion sickness part is interesting, never thought about that. In flat.social, you get a 3D view but it's isometric by default, not a first-person view experience.

lopis•18 minutes ago

The first person ones were definitely more motion sickness inducing, but 3rd person view also apparently causes it. There was one person for whom even the 2D game caused some sickness when panning the camera around. I was very surprised.

Stevvo•about 1 hour ago

HRTF spatialized audio should make your meetings shorter through more efficient communication. It's not about "bonding". For example in a traditional online meeting, it's very difficult to interrupt/interject but than can be done naturally with good spatial audio.

yawz•about 1 hour ago

I always wonder who the right audience is for this type of virtual environment for online meetings. And I am seriously curious because I am probably too old to relate to younger professionals these days, so I may be missing something that other may find fun.

hmokiguess•about 1 hour ago

Well, in my case I am more than glad to be missing on this fun is my point.

I think I wouldn't be able to function well in a work environment that had this kind of setup for their meetings on a regular basis, it would feel very draining to me.

I would be certainly open to it infrequently, or as an opt-in, but if the workplace moves towards this direction I know I would struggle.

coldblues•about 2 hours ago

Performance is poor with frequent stutters.

I think we peaked at https://www.gather.town/

The only on-par open source solution is https://workadventu.re/, but it is impossible to self-host to the point that one would think they're doing it on purpose so that you pay them for hosting.

serf•about 1 hour ago

>The only on-par open source solution is https://workadventu.re/, but it is impossible to self-host to the point that one would think they're doing it on purpose so that you pay them for hosting.

is there a name for this? I've seen it all over recently. Ente products are like that; it's self-hostable but you've gotta really want it.

One trademark of this : the first steps of install are easy, but then it progresses into this quagmire of no-docs/old-docs/presets that favor the company somehow.

one of these things, (maybe ente photos/auth?) were self-hostable but there was a secret button on the mobile app that had to be known about to input a server URI outside of the cloud host to connect the app to the server backend that's self-hosted. Why would you go to that extent if not to add friction?

pawelwentpawel•about 2 hours ago

Hey, thanks for the feedback! It might be the first map load that's a bit heavy (I'm working on this now) - later once everything is loaded it should be much faster. Was it just the first couple seconds that were problematic for you or you stayed longer?

PS. there is also a bunch of graphic tiers which suit more older machines. If you click on the top right there is a menu which has a graphics tab. It should switch automatically after a while too.

jackb4040•about 3 hours ago

Those videos of the actual webcam feeds are AI-generated, right? If I were you I would at least use the videos of real people from the original demo, if not try to have another live demo. Maybe not the highest priority but it does affect the first impression of the product and whether people assume it's a vibecoded mess under the hood or not.

Anyways, is source available anywhere?

pawelwentpawel•about 3 hours ago

Yep, the faces in the demo video are AI right now, mostly for speed. I built a little system to direct / record it but real faces coming soon too!

raphman•about 2 hours ago

mildly interesting detail: some of the videos also include an audio track - and because some of the videos are mirrored in time, you get to hear demonic voices:

https://flat-social-bucket.lon1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/p...

(and I really like this audio-less one: https://flat-social-bucket.lon1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/p...)

gus_massa•about 3 hours ago

Real faces as in your friends or actors, or real faces as in unsuspecting users? (I guess the first.)

pawelwentpawel•about 3 hours ago

Just friends!

jackb4040•about 3 hours ago

Haha cool I figured that's all it was.

toader•about 3 hours ago

Are developers still in denial about the capabilities of coding agents, "vibecoded mess under the hood or not"? If the application works, do you think most users are thinking about the code quality?

jackb4040•about 3 hours ago

OP actually just answered my question with no problem, we're all good bro. We don't need pro-AI evangelists inserting themselves.

dangond•about 3 hours ago

As someone who has seen and used (and disliked) many similar pieces of software, something about this feels much better and natural (I think it's that your avatar is just a circle with your video on it). Great job on nailing the feel of it!

pawelwentpawel•about 3 hours ago

Thank you! Getting the vibe right was definitely a challenging part, especially light and colours

folder•about 1 hour ago

Really lovely concept. I think your welcome map is too complex seems like that should be simplified for a good first experience for more devices. I'd like to be able to rotate around the map but seems like it's fixed in one direction. I picked up 5 balloons and started to fly but i couldn't get down.

pawelwentpawel•about 1 hour ago

Thank you! There is a button to switch the type of view on the bottom left (isometric, top view, first person) which could help out here.

To release the balloons you need to press space and you will fall back down on the ground.

monoRepo11•about 2 hours ago

This looks cool! I think I would use it more as an online platform for friends rather than work or business. Maybe lean more into the social / games aspects

raphman•about 2 hours ago

Sounds interesting - especially as gather.town no longer offers an event option. However, the landing page uses 100% CPU and stutters a lot. Also, signup does not work for me, with https://app.flat.social/api/auth/signup returning 403 forbidden:

  {"success":false,"error":"Verification failed, please try again"}

(No captcha was shown on the page.)

ricksunny•about 1 hour ago

The UX sits in an interesting hybrid place between Gather App and Katmai - would be fun to try out with collaborators sometime

fittingopposite•about 2 hours ago

> I had a couple of months off this year, so I locked myself in an (almost) jungle house in Brazil

Tell us more about this experience. Very interesting!

pawelwentpawel•about 2 hours ago

Pure silence, strong internet, great food and monkeys to feed in the garden every morning. One of the best work environments I had in years :)

prometheus1992•about 3 hours ago

Okay, you got me on the first impressions. signed up. also, use a demo video which has real people doing those activities and smiling etc. A little bit of authenticity will go a long way here.

pawelwentpawel•about 3 hours ago

Thanks! Yep totally agree on the demo faces, they were mostly AI now for the speed but more videos with humans coming soon.

harvey9•about 2 hours ago

Having a birds eye view changes the dynamic of an in person event because you can more easily observe who makes a beeline for who. But as someone who gets a headache from first person games I still prefer birds eye anyway.

pawelwentpawel•about 2 hours ago

Thanks for feedback! You can actually select between a couple views - isometric, view from the top and first-person view.

Vishal_Max•about 2 hours ago

This is so cool, i am going to try this with my friends, i will let you know about the experience.

pawelwentpawel•about 2 hours ago

Thank you! There is also a little support / feedback button on the bottom left. Whenever you have any comments, feel free to use it.

topper00_raptor•about 3 hours ago

Really fun, reminds me of this app my company use to use during Covid https://workadventu.re/

pawelwentpawel•about 3 hours ago

Thank you! Yep there was a bunch of those, a lot of them with a pixel style aesthetic.

mtford•about 3 hours ago

Very impressive, well done!

zacharycohn•about 4 hours ago

This is super neat.

pawelwentpawel•about 4 hours ago

Thank you!

findthebug•about 3 hours ago

i call this the end game of social media

kittikitti•about 3 hours ago

This is really great and I hope it succeeds. I am waiting for a service that combines the virtual spaces concepts of Habbo Hotel into digital meeting spaces. I think Meta VR attempted this but it was too clunky (requires a headset). Mozilla Hubs attempted this too but it was too similar to Second Life and Roblox in the sense that things were not modular enough and it takes too long to do simple things.

pawelwentpawel•about 2 hours ago

Thank you! There might not be as many elements in flat.social as there are in Habbo Hotel but I built an entire map builder which you can use to customise your space. There is a bunch of options - from procedural persian rugs to furnite, plants and lamps. You can even add a dill pickles jar that vigorously opens itself when you press enter.

xander_north•about 3 hours ago

This is amazing!

pawelwentpawel•about 3 hours ago

Thank you!

KolmogorovComp•about 3 hours ago

this is unbearably slow and unusable on Safari.

pawelwentpawel•about 3 hours ago

Thanks for the feedback! Initial couple seconds when the map is loading are indeed slow, I'll be optimising this as my priority in the next days.

micromacrofoot•about 3 hours ago

I would work on affordances for when people with 0 gaming experience need to join, maybe a flat or simplified mode that someone can opt in to.

I have a lot of experience testing a defunct spatial conferencing app during the pandemic and gamers had fun with it but people with no gaming experience universally hated it and wanted nothing to do with it. There were no affordances or instructions that made a dent after months of trying.

homeonthemtn•31 minutes ago

It's a cute social app. The moment it becomes forced "bonding" with your coworkers is the moment it gets weird and dystopian

Also the moment it gets a public room, you're getting a dick and balls chasing that soccer ball

Just saying