Excited to share a side project I have been working on with my friends at Fluxon (Erad and AJ (@lasersox)) and Katsuya Noguchi (@katsuyan).
We got sick of all the Zoom happy hours, birthday parties, and company get togethers. In parallel, serendipity largely died - you could no longer run into a friend or co-worker or interesting new person given social distancing.
So, we put together Pluto - built on webRTC with MediaSoup and webGL with THREE.js and many other technologies.
Pluto is a browser-only VR space (no headsets needed) for spacial video chats and hangouts. You can move around in using first-person shooter-like controls. Sound decays with distance so different groups can break up and hang out.
Just drop in a link, and you can attend an event over video (no headset, no nothing). Create a virtual world in just one click!
Everything is represented in 3D which means people can randomly run into each other and serendipity can finally happen again.
We have built out a number of worlds using Blender to construct 3D models of :
-Burning Man
-The Maldives
-Admont Abbey Library
-A room in old Austria.
You can go to https://pluto.video to try it in your own VR in-browser world. It is best tried out with friends but can also be fun to explore the virtual world solo.
Come check it out and let us all know what you think!
It is still early / janky but we wanted to get it out there and get some feedback :)
Pluto was partially inspired in part by new social experiments on the web like Clubhouse, Gatherly, Rally, Rambly, Sonar, Teamflow, Yorb and others....
I’m confused. Does it work with a headset? The mobile site isn’t clear on this. I have an Oculus Quest, and for a moment I got excited to see a browser-based VR chat app (the Firefox Reality browser has good VR plugin support). If it doesn’t work with headsets at all, then in my view VR is a misleading adjective.
I believe it does not and "VR" is a misnomer here. It's all pancake stuff with just WebGL.
From a quick glance there seem to be no WebVR/WebXR support in there (nothing checks for VR hardware and the minified JS doesn't seem to have any obvious API references).
Looks like a lot of people made new names or posted for the first time in years just to say how great this is and how excited they are. Some even posted the same message.
The notion that you’re live on video with others in the virtual space (instead of say, representing yourself with an avatar) creates such a surprisingly special experience. In this way, I think Pluto subtly and beautifully mirrors what real world interaction actually feels like. Excited to see where this project goes!
Agreed. I really dislike avatar-only interaction. Tried it recently with a Quest and it's hard to read who you're talking with, or recognize a face you've met in person.
Combining video of the face mapped onto a virtual space really seems like the winning combo - there are a few groups doing this and it's the only thing I want to nudge my professional contacts to try out.
We tried similar service in concept, called Teamflow. I manage a team of 12 people and thought it would be great to create serendipitous connections. It was fun the first couple of days. Lot of improptu conversations happened. Within 4 days, novelty effect wore off and I was all alone there.
I think the main problem around adopting such tech is that, existing workflows and habit loops are pretty mature (though not ideal). Zoom / hangout meetings, chat on slack etc. Because of that, it's hard to 'remember' to login to such virtual office spaces that would enable those convos.
I want to hear if there are teams that were able to adopt successfully and what level of early enforcement was required to create that habit loop (i personally hate such enforcement, but might not avoidable).
I'm a big fan of spatial audio and I think this is really cool. I like that it doesn't make me use my mouse too much which makes it way easier to use on a laptop with trackpad.
It would be nice if there were alternatives to login besides Google (like email?).
I had a lot of fun using this to catch up with some colleagues I haven't seen in a while. Very cool!
I have some feedback:
It would be cool to have some really interesting sculpture art to sort of seed groups of people talking in the museum level. I'm specifically requesting like a mutating 3d fractal sculpture that might invite people to gather. Or a campfire.
I thought that having all the different worlds is cool but if everyone is in one location and you're in a different world it's easy to get isolated.
Along the same lines, it would be cool if the size of the level sort of scaled with the size of the group in some way.
I gave it a shot and it was the closest I had felt to being at a party since covid. I usually bounce around at parties IRL and no other virtual experience had given me that ability so far.
This was a really fun experience.
If you're organizing a 16+ person happy hour it's a great way to organically let the group split into smaller conversations.
WebRTC itself makes videoconferencing platform incredibly easy to make (you can even just copy-past a working tutorial!). Three.js[1] makes the 3D-world part quite easy as well, then howler.js[1] does the spacial audio for you.
Tada! you have your Pluto clone in a few days!
(the open-source JavaScript ecosystem is pretty impressive)
This is one of the best implementations I have seen thus far. The fact you can go "outside" reminds me of Second Life and its unfortunate most other ventures didn't capitalize on this.
Ha well the use of 'portals' to warp between spaces (eg, burning man!) definitely felt like "entering the underworld". This definitely had a second-life-in-a-browser vibe. I know a few artists that would love to hold virtual gallery tours in a set up like this.
(also, pluto+video made me think of pluto.tv - a live tv app)
I have spent my evening on Pluto. It's a great product! I run a 80 people startup and I have been looking for ways to restore serendipity. I tried several products notably Altspace VR, Mozilla Hubs, Teamflow and Decentraland
Reasons I prefer Pluto to other products
- Easy to sign-in
- Faster to load
- Doesn't lag
- See my friends' face (killer feature versus an avatar)
- Spacial video chat
I have spent my evening on Pluto. It's a great product! I run a 80 people startup and I have been looking for ways to restore serendipity. I tried several products notably Altspace VR, Mozilla Hubs, Teamflow and Decentraland.
Reasons I prefer Pluto to other products
- Easy to sign-in
- Faster to load
- Doesn't lag
- See my friends' face (killer feature versus an avatar)
- Spacial video chat
We got sick of all the Zoom happy hours, birthday parties, and company get togethers. In parallel, serendipity largely died - you could no longer run into a friend or co-worker or interesting new person given social distancing.
So, we put together Pluto - built on webRTC with MediaSoup and webGL with THREE.js and many other technologies.
Pluto is a browser-only VR space (no headsets needed) for spacial video chats and hangouts. You can move around in using first-person shooter-like controls. Sound decays with distance so different groups can break up and hang out.
Just drop in a link, and you can attend an event over video (no headset, no nothing). Create a virtual world in just one click!
Everything is represented in 3D which means people can randomly run into each other and serendipity can finally happen again.
We have built out a number of worlds using Blender to construct 3D models of : -Burning Man -The Maldives -Admont Abbey Library -A room in old Austria.
You can go to https://pluto.video to try it in your own VR in-browser world. It is best tried out with friends but can also be fun to explore the virtual world solo.
Come check it out and let us all know what you think!
It is still early / janky but we wanted to get it out there and get some feedback :)
We will be hanging out at an instance from 11am to 1:30pm PT at https://team.pluto.video.
Pluto was partially inspired in part by new social experiments on the web like Clubhouse, Gatherly, Rally, Rambly, Sonar, Teamflow, Yorb and others....