Spatial.chat style video


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”. 

@John Bowers Nice call!

This is a very-soon-to-be high-demand game changer for conference/workshop users.   

Self-directed (vote with your ‘feet’) conversation selection (highly dynamic/organic, self organizing break out rooms. 

 

Workshop organizers are hungry for this capability.  


I agree 100%.

This could be a game changer for online meetings and it seems like only Miro is positioned to get it right. For both Spatial.Chat and HighFidelity.com (similar service) the visual / spatial experience is very superficial and adds very little to the experience. In Miro however it could be a huge multiplier to productivity, education, experience and live events.

 

Please tell me you’re working on it…


@John Bowers, I agree but want to check if you already tried using Miro and Spatial.chat in combination? By sharing screen - which would be the screen presenting Miro on which everyone is logged into, you could create an experience as described.

Would love to hear your thoughts and ideas.


There are a few other threads similar to this one. Might be worthwhile putting our voting power behind them.

That wonder.me solution looks amazing.

https://community.miro.com/wish-list-32/spatial-chat-style-video-1760


But SpatialChat has long integrated with Miro (an absolute must-have for our meetings).

This is already a game changer: live communication + freedom of movement + using integrations for collaborative work.