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.
I’d love a special or grouping aspect so that you can limit or focus conversations.
I’ve been in a VR hangout and one person was monopolizing the conversation. Walking away is a very natural signal and allows for a new side conversation to form.
It doesn’t have to be VR of course, but some kind of break out session while the main content continues.
That's great to hear that you are open to addressing this UX feature.
Being able to hang out in a room alone to signal that you are open to chat if someone wants to join makes for a completely different user journey from calling someone and interrupting your interlocutor.
In a similar spirit, it could be cool if some coffeeshops and restaurants explicitly designated one of their communal table as a 'talk table'. Where if you sit at it, it means you are open to chatting with your neighbors.
I know that many places already have communal tables but I find that unless there's some explicit display a place is meant for a certain purpose, many people who want to chat / meet new people won't initiate because they can't be sure their neighbours are open to it. If they purposefully decide to sit at a 'talk table', then you can be sure they are.
In real life spaces, we often decide to switch to a different conversation from hearing a snippet or zoning in to what's going on around you when you're bored of the current talk. In this system, I feel like it would be rude to bring yourself over to a group and then leave again when you decide you're not interested in the conversation. Perhaps being able to mouse over a location to here the audio would be good. I don't think there's much expectation of privacy in a space like this anyway.
I think this spacial arrangement would generally make such social dilemmas easier to handle. For instance, I think it would be more awkward to abruptly leave a room during a conversation than to just sidle away. Leaving slowly could implicitly invite others to follow.
The internet has forced us to create a bunch of new social protocols and norms. Why not design our tools to fit with our existing ones?
I tried to propose an idea where I work of having a threaded chat room to mimic conversations in the hall. It could get even better by having some intelligent gleaning of conversation keywords and showing those visibly by each chat room, so people know when their ears should be tingling and can join in on the conversation.
The method of a single chat room means multiple crossing conversations become hard and there's constant distraction trying to see what people are talking about only to find it's not interesting to you.
I can see the appeal in being able to drift in and out of conversations. The private room dynamic is kinda rigid, I basically have to explicitly secede from one conversation to start another.
Who cares? If I'm on a train heading home, I don't want my conversation terminated because I get too far away. Just link the rooms to one or more relevant locations so people can find them initially, then let people favourite them or whatever so they can rejoin later without having to be in that location.
I couldn’t agree more! These rooms are capped at 4 people max per room, but you can configure it to go down to as small as 2 people per room. To keep the conversation flowing better.
Unfortunately I wasn't really able to test this out as there are no users in my area, but I was wondering how you are tackling / plan to tackle the following problem:
Suppose two people are almost but not quite 1km away from each other and are having a conversation on there. To a third person who has one of these people in range, but not the other, the messages might seem quite confusing and/or they might feel addressed even though they are not.
A possible solution might be to define fixed cells of roughly 1km in diameter instead of using immediate neighbourhoods centered around every participant.
Or you could dynamically create rooms and you are added to the closest one to you (up to some maximum size)? The latter might also help with getting any users at all in less densely populated areas.
I guess I was thinking of something in between a private conversation and a meeting. Things like chatting in a shared office (which I know is a distracting no-no in some contexts, but not all, at least when it comes to a slightly extended greeting/farewell), or in the kitchen/corridor/doorway/photocopier room. Anywhere people naturally gather and mingle when they're not necessarily in full work mode. Depending on the workplace, that sort of thing is very common and a ban would seem weird and draconian.
Was there a reason that, in this case, you couldn't all walk closer to each other? We additionally have "private spaces" you can set up so that everyone in that area can see/hear each other: https://gather.town/features#feature-private-spaces . People often use this so that they can sit down on chairs and talk to only the other people at the table.
Really, you would type in chat with someone who was next to you? A real conversation is such a great thing, that I would not give that up. Much better is what the other guy in the thread is doing, skyping into a big screen in the room as interim-big-brother. Of course, he can't walk in close to join a converstaion, but unless there is a whiteboard or something out of reach, at least the conversation can still move over to him :)
i'd also like to it possible for only one person to speak at the same time.
and keep track of who's talking the most. in some contexts that can be helpful. it might be useful too if each partipant only had the floor for so long.
What about adding a random conversation starter? Maybe it's just me, but I've always found it awkward when a conversation is forced (i.e. two random people pushed into the same chat room, now talk).
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