We’ve been looking at the very nice
https://gather.town
and played around with it. Instead of having a fixed view of all participants, you can walk around and ‘meet’ different persons in gather.town. You can edit the space your liking. It looks very much like a very old-school Zelda:
What I liked a lot about it is the following:
- private rooms – you see only the videos from the people in that room
- nearby videos – only the people around you can see you
- interactive objects – from whiteboard to games, and simple URLs, you can make your space interactive
As a fun-note, it has been rejected to be used for our daily zoom-coffee discussion because: “if somebody leaves an ongoing discussion, this might indicate too harshly to the person talking that they are not interesting”. Well, that was my point. But my diplomacy is known to be quite low…
Another similar tool, much nicer drawing, but lesser functionality, is https://topia.io/.