Yet another Hacker News

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

37 points pawelwentpawel 1 hour ago 23 comments

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!

zacharycohn 56 minutes ago | parent

This is super neat.

pawelwentpawel 55 minutes ago | parent

Thank you!

findthebug 49 minutes ago | parent

i call this the end game of social media

mtford 49 minutes ago | parent

Very impressive, well done!

dangond 47 minutes ago | parent

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 44 minutes ago | parent

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

jackb4040 35 minutes ago | parent

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 25 minutes ago | parent

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!

gus_massa 15 minutes ago | parent

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

pawelwentpawel 6 minutes ago | parent

Just friends!

jackb4040 7 minutes ago | parent

Haha cool I figured that's all it was.

toader 15 minutes ago | parent

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 10 minutes ago | parent

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

toader 8 minutes ago | parent

Not being in denial about the capabilities of coding agents is a far cry from being an "pro-AI evangelists"... 'bro'.

micromacrofoot 34 minutes ago | parent

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.

prometheus1992 32 minutes ago | parent

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 27 minutes ago | parent

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

KolmogorovComp 18 minutes ago | parent

this is unbearably slow and unusable on Safari.

pawelwentpawel 3 minutes ago | parent

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.

topper00_raptor 17 minutes ago | parent

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

pawelwentpawel 7 minutes ago | parent

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

kittikitti 17 minutes ago | parent

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.

xander_north 5 minutes ago | parent

This is amazing!