We Find Interesting, weird/cool stuff
We Find Interesting – Virtual Meeting Spaces Replacing Zoom
We Find Interesting – Virtual Meeting Spaces Replacing Zoom.
ABOUT GATHER TOWN
We’ve all dropped into a virtual meeting space on a site called gather.town, which provides free customizable spaces for anyone who wants to organize a get-together without using Zoom. Gather is a virtual world and you choose an avatar before entering it: imagine a mid-80s Super Mario game in which, instead of jumping over his enemies, Mario has to go to the office. There are pixelated potted palms dotted about my screen, a couple of banks of desks and a sofa area, all rendered in that very specific 2D map style common to early computer games. I’m represented by a tiny, blocky avatar: a collection of dots arranged to look a bit like a person. As I move it around with keyboard keys, I can enter and leave conversations – when I do so, a small live video of whoever I’m talking to appears above the main screen.
It might all sound mad, but Gather is 18 months old, has 4 million users, and recently raised $26m in investment. Universities use it to create virtual campuses; individuals use it to host games nights; groups of friends throw parties on it – and workers are collaborating on it. It is trying, like hundreds of other new platforms, sites and apps, to provide us all with a solution to a very 2021 problem: despite being ubiquitous since early 2020, video calls aren’t necessarily helping us work or stay connected effectively.
Recent research from Stanford University provided evidence that the “Zoom fatigue” many of us feel is real. The study showed that the cognitive load of video conferencing is far higher than phone calls or in-person conversation. Where normally we pick up and give out valuable non-verbal cues from body language, they’re missing from video’s flat, sometimes delayed and often blurry images. We find the sustained, but often off-kilter, eye contact inherent in video calls hard to tolerate. When do you ever stare at multiple looming faces, all at once, for an hour, in real life? We find seeing ourselves on screen stressful, too, and being tied to a screen cuts down our mobility (unlike a phone call, during which we can move).