There are hundreds of other sites, platforms and apps vying to become the next Zoom or Microsoft Teams, offering remote workers more than just a gallery of faces on a screen.
You can’t just pop in and say, ‘Let’s have a chat’ like you can here.” Gather’s other neat trick is keeping the video component low-key – the videos are ranged across the top of the screen, rather than dominating, which forces you to look at just one person at a time as they speak, rather than everyone at once, just as in face-to-face conversations.
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“Almost all of the video-conferencing software requires a reason for the conversation. While some remote workers mourn spontaneous chats and water-cooler moments, “serendipity actually happens here”, he says. It’s more natural.”ĭespite attending real-life industry events for years, Bore reckons he’s gained far more useful connections in this open office with its random attendees. You can walk up to people, go sit at a table with people, jump into a private chat, play games. “If you move your avatar farther away from someone, their voice will get quieter but you can still catch a bit of the conversation. “People can talk at the same time,” Bore says. Have you noticed that if two people try to talk at the same time on most video calls, one voice cuts out? Not on Gather. “You’ve essentially got someone delivering stuff to a group of people, so you can’t have natural interactivity.” Why do Bore and his guests prefer Gather, given that it does also have a video component? “Almost every other video platform is very one way,” he says. Virtual meeting space Gather, whose 4 million users are represented by tiny, blocky avatars. Inviting people to play games such as Pictionary lightens the tone. James Bore, a cybersecurity expert who runs Bores Consultancy, hosts this open office for a couple of hours every week, inviting anyone working in his field via Twitter and LinkedIn to drop in to discuss issues or make new contacts (he also has a remote office for his own team, and hosts a “pub” night in a separate room for more informal networking, as well as helping other businesses organise events online through his company ReuniVous). When do you ever stare at multiple looming faces, all at once, for an hour, in real life? We find seeing ourselves on screen stressful, too, and being tied to a screen cuts down our mobility (unlike a phone call, during which we can move). We find the sustained, but often off-kilter, eye contact inherent in video calls hard to tolerate. Where normally we pick up and give out valuable non-verbal cues from body language, they’re missing from video’s flat, sometimes delayed and often blurry images. The study showed that the cognitive load of video conferencing is far higher than phone calls or in-person conversation. Recent research from Stanford University provided evidence that the “Zoom fatigue” many of us feel is real. It is trying, like hundreds of other new platforms, sites and apps, to provide us all with a solution to a very 2021 problem: despite being ubiquitous since early 2020, video calls aren’t necessarily helping us work or stay connected effectively. Universities use it to create virtual campuses individuals use it to host games nights groups of friends throw parties on it – and workers are collaborating on it.
It might all sound mad, but Gather is 18 months old, has 4 million users, and recently raised $26m in investment. As I move it around with keyboard keys, I can enter and leave conversations – when I do so, a small live video of whoever I’m talking to appears above the main screen. I’m represented by a tiny, blocky avatar: a collection of dots arranged to look a bit like a person. There are pixelated potted palms dotted about my screen, a couple of banks of desks and a sofa area, all rendered in that very specific 2D map style common to early computer games. Gather is a virtual world and you choose an avatar before entering it: imagine a mid-80s Super Mario game in which, instead of jumping over his enemies, Mario has to go to the office.
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We’ve all dropped into a virtual meeting space on a site called gather.town, which provides free customisable spaces for anyone who wants to organise a get-together without using Zoom.
This is not at all how I usually spend my Thursdays. I ’m playing online Pictionary while chatting with five people I’ve never met.
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