We had a great ~10 minute video chat in the middle of the street about the possibilities of virtual realms. I've just popped him an email and sent some techno recommendations :).
Good luck with Online Town! I think we'll see a whole spate of similar ideas focusing on a variety of niches.
Just tried online town (I'm on Firefox 75 on Windows) with my girlfriend (she was on her ipad), and I could see my video in a box, and she could see her video in a box, but we couldn't see each other. The fade in/out worked on distance, but only of the box - no audio or video of each other.
She was also initially unwilling to enter the room as she thought she'd be in a room with three men (from the sample image given when visiting a room link) - I know it says 'on the left there's an example', but maybe that might need replacing?
Really great idea, though, and much needed at the moment!
One thing I wanted right away was to enlarge the video feed of one person so I could better see him, attend a presentation, etc.
The other "need" is that I wanted to interact more with the environment and play with others, even if I have no specific idea.
Anyways this was very fun and I'll try in my company next week, many thanks again!
One of the creators here.
It's a cross between Zoom x Pokemon. You only get audio and video from people you're standing next to, and as you walk away from them, the video fades away and the audio drops off.
With current video chat apps, you lose many of the dynamics of real life meetups. In particular, you lose the ability to have multiple people in the same shared space having multiple conversations.
In real life events, you can talk to a few people at a time while still being able to quickly go from one conversation to the next. With video chat, you have to talk to everyone at the same time.
Online Town is meant to fix this.
The way it works is, when you're near someone you get their audio and video, when you walk away from them their video drops off, and their audio fades out.
So you can have multiple conversations within a single virtual space.
Join me in the public room! Would love to get your all thoughts on it :)