4kevinking
Joined 13 years ago
Karma
243
Submissions
57
Member since
Nov 11
Recent submissions
Comment · 6 years ago
Hello Hackernews!
Over the last couple of months I have been working on a new way to have social events over video (https://bigroom.video).
As with the rest of the world, my last company transitioned to being completely remote with the rise of covid. We tried to emulate our old lunchroom and bar happy-hour dynamic over Zoom, but found that we could really only have one person speak at a time. With a 20 person Zoom lunch, this turns into each person telling a story one-by-one, people stepping on each others' toes, and a loss of the small dynamic conversations that would normally happen at any social event.
Bigroom has two major features that help bring the dynamism back to socializing.
Dynamic channels let you break off into a separate conversation with one click. At any social event I've been to, people are always separated into groups of 3-6 and individuals bounce between those groups. Dynamic channels allow this behavior without the rigidity of Zoom breakout rooms.
Whispering temporarily mutes your audio to everyone except one person. Click-and-hold on someone's video to start whispering, and let go of your mouse to stop. It's possible for two people to have a complete 1-on-1 conversation within a large group of people by whispering to each other.
Bigroom works on desktop Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, with mobile support planned. On the technical side, Bigroom consists of a web client and a websocket server, both written entirely in rust. I used the elm-like yew framework compiled to wasm for the frontend and async-tungstenite for the websocket backend. The entire client app compiles down to <1MB.
All video and audio is transmitted over peer-to-peer WebRTC connections. This puts a natural limit to how many people can be actively using video in a single channel (depending on the computer I find it is between 10 and 20), although I am considering a client-server architecture in the future to make it scale similarly to zoom.
Bigroom is in free open beta and doesn't even require an account to use.
Looking forward to your feedback!
-Kevin
Comment · 6 years ago
https://bigroom.video here's a clickable link since HN doesn't parse URLs in the description :)
Comment · 6 years ago
I'm actually getting this spam now (started a couple months ago). Would love advice on how to get rid of it!
Comment · 7 years ago
Thanks for the feedback! You can copy an escaped version by clicking the icon in the upper-right.
Comment · 7 years ago
Thanks for the suggestion! This is on our product roadmap.
One way to track users is also to specify approve/reject redirect urls with random tokens (though we agree that private metadata is more ergonomic in this case).
Comment · 7 years ago
That's a mocked-up css animation, not a video of the actual email. Feel free to try the demo in the API dashboard to see the full UX.
Comment · 8 years ago
AWS doesn't yet support U2F, but once they add it Krypton would work as well.
We don't currently support importing SSH private keys but are considering it in the future. You can upload your public key to AWS IAM (they only support RSA) and other cloud providers through the normal methods. `kr me` prints out your public key and it can be pasted in anywhere a local SSH public key would be added.
Comment · 8 years ago
Hi HN!
We've made it possible to use your phone as a U2F authenticator. Just download the Krypton app and browser extension, then pair your phone to your browser by scanning the QR code. Our goal is to make unphishable 2-factor authentication more accessible, especially to users that don't want to purchase and carry around a separate hardware fob.
Looking forward to your questions and feedback!
currently: working on https://bigroom.video
past: distributed systems engineer @ mux co-founder @ krypt.co
interests: infra & applied crypto & music & vr