The Problem of Remote Mingling
Want to talk to someone, give a class, or have a meeting? There are plenty of good tools that you can use, such as Webex, Zoom, and Blackboard.
One activity that these tools do not seem good at is mingling. Suppose a university department has a weekly tea. If held in a room on campus, people would gather in small groups and would naturally drift from one conversation to another. Because you are standing close to each other, this churn can happen pretty seemlessly because you can hear conversations around you, divide your attention if you hear something interesting from another group, and gradually move to talk less and less with the first people you were talking with and more and more with the second.
In any of the remote conferencing tools I’ve seen, the best one can do is have video feeds of the other people stacked in an array like the credits from The Brady Bunch. These are designed to talk to everyone at once.
As far as I’ve seen, it is cumbersome to even have multiple conversations. In Blackboard, the administrator can create Groups, but its not something (I think) that can be done on the fly, certainly not spontaneously by different participants. In any of the programs, one can use the chat function to type conversations aimed at a single person, but then you may not notice that someone is trying to talk to you over the main conversation. If there is a “direct your audio to one person” function I’m overlooking, the multitasking problem is even worse. In either case, multiple conversations are tricky, and being able to mingle – drift in and out of conversations with various groups of people – is impossible.
I’m not even sure what would be a good way to do it. A virtual room with avatars drifting around as in a real room? Arranging the video feeds as in a room and allow your image to approach others, with audio volume proportional to distance? Something more abstract?
Does this function look useful to people? Has anyone seen a program that does what I’m talking about?