This weekend I’ll be hosting round two of the awesome Pleasure Pirates experience as part of the Co-Reality Collective’s Island Festival.
When you first enter the festival, this map will be interactive, letting you know how many people are in each zone and their schedule. Something that is often annoying about these mega-virtual events is that it’s hard to tell where people are, so you often end up spending a lot of time bouncing between dead Zoom rooms.
The experience I had at the last event we did included the use of Discord to try to connect everyone with text chat and video sharing, but it felt even more chaotic to me. I may be revealing my age here, but even as a technophile I find Discord to be overwhelming.
What I liked when I attended the Co-Reality Collective’s previous event was this cool map — which we are now on!
1. How to use subtle AR filters to survive your Zoom meetings?
2. The First No-Headset Virtual Monitor
I’ve been thinking a ton about ways to facilitate connection and truly engaging experiences in virtual worlds. This has always been something that interested me, from virtual reality’s debut and decline to our current pandemic where virtual is the only way to connect for many of us.
Problems with Current Tech that Gets in the Way of Connection
Popular tools and tech aren’t that good. Zoom rooms and Google Hangouts feel sterile and clunky. At least, Zoom has virtual backgrounds and there’s always Snap Camera to add a bit more personality, but there are still some limitations I’ve discovered including:
- Can’t look directly into someone’s eyes
- Hard to get seniors and less-techy folks onboard due to poorly designed interfaces, complicated signup flow (I was able to get my 92 year old grandma into a Hangout recently, but we were both exhausted afterward!)
- Audio quality / audio “ducking” with background noise, and echo issues if not properly muted make it hard to do watch parties
- Wifi and connectivity issues prevent natural conversation flow
- Difficult to have group discussions, it still feels like only one person can talk at a time
- Privacy issues and hacking especially with Zoom
Of course, some of these things can be solved by changing some settings or upgrading your hardware, while others will take some time and investment from tech companies.
Zoom Rooms (Breakout Rooms) are Okay
I’m not trying to knock Zoom too much, as I am a paid user. It’s the best a lot of us can do and nearly everyone has it now so it’s familiar. The first weekend with the Pleasure Pirates we used Zoom, but I advised that we try breakout rooms so that the tarot readings could be more private. It worked well, but not amazingly well. The Zoom host is the only one who can assign users to a breakout room (not a co-host) so it was literally a full time job for one person. In addition, it’s very hard to move people once assigned, and if you want to get someone out of a room or close some unused rooms you have to close *all* the rooms. I will keep my eye on it as it’s a promising feature, but unless Zoom makes some improvements there I can’t recommend it for all but the most patient hosts and non-luddite audiences.
Shared Virtual Spaces Are Better
For this weekend, we’ve created an interactive non-Zoom room using incredible tech developed by an engineer I met during the last pirate escapade. It’s a peer-to-peer encrypted (read: private!) video conferencing page where your video is an avatar you can move around and talk to people in the room based on how close you are to them:
It’s been interesting to attend a few massive online gatherings in the last month and I’ve noticed a few other apps like this that are cropping up.
Shared virtual spaces, more-so than video conferencing, can provide a sense of togetherness. Not to mention fun!
I do want to shout out theses developments in the virtual-connection space that are doing a similar thing that’s more like a virtual world than a video call:
Online Town — launched in April 2020, has a similar audio-attenuation feature to our room, which makes group video chatting easier and more natural as you move around the map with your arrow keys. Graphics are all 8-bit style and it’s a pretty crude but charming site.
Topia.io — a beautifully designed, illustrative world that you explore, video chat, and leave little objects on the screen with messages depending on what the creator setup. I visited a Burning Man temple experience, and their featured experience is about reimagining the end-of-life experience. It’s very meditative. All of the experiences I’ve seen have a similar aesthetic and if you’re interested in creating your own, you will have to contact the founders as they will be helping you design it.
…
This week I‘ve been creating new graphics that will designate different zones and hopefully encourage some spontaneous play in this custom web app that can host up to 50 people at once.
ENTRY: from the map of the partypelago, head towards the…
SCROLL: on-boarding and pirate initiation ritual.
MAIN DECK: party, performance, and punishment for any bad-deed-doers.
INNER LEVEL: tarot readings from a custom deck.
OTHER AREAS: storytelling and one-off conversations.
In the future I plan to add some more things like a treasure chest, mermaid, and crocodile with various interactive features.
Closing Thoughts on Community & Personal Connection
Our formative Pleasure Pirates outing took place three weeks ago during another epic, multi-day online festival. It was the same week that George Floyd was murdered. It felt weird to be joyful that weekend, but I was glad to find that the organizers of our festival had created a #port-of-reality channel discussing knowing your rights along with other resources, plus an incredible workshop stage on Twitch with timely discussions like “art as activism.” It was truly grounding and made me feel more connected with the world and the community.
Whatever technology you choose, remember that the basis and the *why* of these video calls is to facilitate connection. Whether it’s with your elderly relative or a festival-goer, as a host it’s your job to get people talking and have the tech be secondary. Just like a good phone call with a friend, remember to get real with each other once in a while by actually checking in and getting a temperature reading from everyone in the experience. Welcome new people as they come in, acknowledge those that are quiet, and if possible connect people to each other as a good dinner party host would do.
And ultimately, you have to allow yourself to feel connected. Video calls are sometimes weird and awkward. But connection is possible, and is more important than ever as social creatures in our physically-distant world.
