I’ve daydreamed of an event where folks here can just mingle and socialize with little agenda. A sort of virtual picnic where we get to know each other better as people and turn off the Resonate Brain for a bit.
For a long time I felt this wouldn’t work because well… how do you do that? Create 10 different Jitsi rooms, name them after each part of a house (Kitchen, Living Room, Rooftop) and have folks jump from one to the next vibe and convo? I guess that could work…?
Then I found a platform called Topia where you can make a cute little world and actually mingle. Move a little character around screen, creating groups organically – and still get to see someone’s face on screen when you’re near them, not just an avatar.
Topia as a company def seems into the whole Web3 NFT vibe which is meh. But the chat experience is fun and doesn’t involve any web3 stuff, you just drop in and you’re there – don’t even need an account. It’s easy for one person to set up a world in Topia and up to 30 people at a time can be there. (more than 30 you gotta pay for a subscription). Whether “official” or not as a Resonate event, just sounds like a good time.
Is there a possibility to personalize worlds with our own assets? That would be terrific and fun and I have ideas
If not I agree a small low-tech mmo-garden for chat hanging could be fun, there’s a lot of that in the VR realm and it used to be sort of a thing a decade ago but I think it failed to reach critical mass because of a lack of real use cases. (it’s, in a sense, been beaten by the more clinical and down to earth approach of UI/Channel based softwares like Discord/Mattermost etc.)
I’m all for the weird little chaotic social experiments like that. The early internet was full of those, being based much more around self-maintained microcommunities.
You can go all out creating your own assets, import your own drawings, embed live video streams – tons of rad stuff.
For folks less familiar with what “asset” means in this context, it means sort of the furniture or building blocks that you can use to design a space. For example, Topia comes with a bunch of different trees you could use to make a forest – but you could also draw your own tree, import it, and use that as an “asset” – duplicating it, moving it around, etc.
Topia looks cute. I hadn’t seen that one before. I’m much more familiar with gather.town, which is a bit more constrained with what you can do but a similar idea (and, as far as I know, NOT into web3).
