I would love to see something like spatial.chat in Miro. I want to use Miro to run group work for online classrooms. I use an inquiry based learning approach called POGIL in some of my classes that has students work in teams of 4 on problems. In a physical class I would have square tables each with four seats and students collaboratively editing one printed document per team/table. I can see the same thing happening in Miro--post the PDF for students to work on and let each group have its own space on the whiteboard to work. The problem is that they couldn’t all have their audio / video running, so I’ll have to manage it through some external tool like Zoom. I would strongly prefer, however, an interface like https://spatial.chat where each user would have a token small video window on the screen that they could move around and the closer you are to someone else the more you hear them. This way I could “walk around” my virtual classroom and have the ability to overhear what students are working on without the full on interruption that accompanies the instructor jumping into a Zoom breakout room.
Also it is important to have the audio attenuation so you can still hear (but at a much lower volume) conversations that are occurring elsewhere in the classroom. This way you can jump over to a conversation that’s going on and point something out but it’s not dominating everyone’s audio.
For those who haven’t used spatial chat: You have a token you can drag around a digital space with the mouse (which happens to include your video, though this isn’t a requirement IMO). The closer your token is to another person’s token, the louder their audio is for you. It feels a lot more like being in a room with a lot of people chatting and you can drop in and out of different conversations by “moving around”.
