I find the mental overhead of the always-on camera exhausting, and I prefer voice only communication for certain types of conversations so I can dedicate all my processing power to what's being said. I also pace when I'm thinking, make coffee, lay down, etc.
In a pleasant twist of fate, migrating our full company (20ish people) into gather.town has largely made it a moot point for me now.
I have the choice between zoom like video boxes or switching to small thumbnails I largely ignore in favor of viewing/interacting with the 2D scene.
Also, when you see someone walking by and they "drop in" for a quick chat, the context for the visual feed seems more natural and less encumbering than spinning up a zoom meeting: they approach, you talk, they walk away, and you're alone again. If I pace IRL during the discussion and am off camera, my avatar is reinforcing that I'm still in the same space with the other participants.
If I don't want to be interrupted I go to a blocked off private area; the 2D equivalent of a DnD status.
(Wish I didn't have to add this disclaimer but this is the internet: I am not, nor have ever been affiliated with gather in any way. That friends was just an earnest anecdote and soft reccomendation)
That's really interesting. I have used gather.town for conferences before and it works really well - but I haven't seen it used on an ongoing basis. It does make sense in a lot of ways to incorporate some of those physical cues of an office environment into a WFH setting.
It's strange but really cool to zoom out and see various meetings between people in different rooms, or when we bring an outside contact into our space for a meeting you can introduce them to coworkers ad-hoc (like a real office).
Swinging by with a guest, like other real world experiences translated into a 2D world, require developing a new set of social norms. For instance, if you're screen sharing through their app, you won't see someone approaching and the screen share feed will show up expanded by default for whomever enters. That can be problematic for a number of reasons (client data, personal info you were sharing with a close coworker, etc.).
We also have recreated games like tag using the confetti feature, have rituals like hitting a lap around the entire space on go karts after code reviews, and occasionally raid Client Experience's office for supplies.
It is a jealous god when it comes to CPU though and since modern JS environments are greedy as well, my fan gets a lot of work.
I find the mental overhead of the always-on camera exhausting, and I prefer voice only communication for certain types of conversations so I can dedicate all my processing power to what's being said. I also pace when I'm thinking, make coffee, lay down, etc.
In a pleasant twist of fate, migrating our full company (20ish people) into gather.town has largely made it a moot point for me now.
I have the choice between zoom like video boxes or switching to small thumbnails I largely ignore in favor of viewing/interacting with the 2D scene.
Also, when you see someone walking by and they "drop in" for a quick chat, the context for the visual feed seems more natural and less encumbering than spinning up a zoom meeting: they approach, you talk, they walk away, and you're alone again. If I pace IRL during the discussion and am off camera, my avatar is reinforcing that I'm still in the same space with the other participants.
If I don't want to be interrupted I go to a blocked off private area; the 2D equivalent of a DnD status.
(Wish I didn't have to add this disclaimer but this is the internet: I am not, nor have ever been affiliated with gather in any way. That friends was just an earnest anecdote and soft reccomendation)