Online Town solves Zoom's problem with group video chats

Let's just go ahead and admit the unavoidable truth: Huge group video chats are kind of a drag. It's unavoidable ... that is, except in Online Town.

As we all remain stuck inside for the foreseeable future due to the coronavirus, many of us have come to depend on tools like Zoom to connect with friends and family and to help keep us sane. However, unlike with a real, in-person get-together, on video calls everyone is forced to speak over one another, and spontaneous side conversations are difficult, if not impossible. Online Town, a new video-chat platform, solves that problem in the most hilarious, simple, and fun way possible.

The idea is straightforward enough. You and your friends all join a password-protected room, and you're each assigned an avatar that you can move around your selected room map with your arrow keys. As with a traditional video chat, you can see and hear your friends. Unlike with a traditional video chat, and more like real life, if you move your icon away from your friends on the room map, you lose visual contact and then audio contact with them.

"It's a video-calling space that lets multiple people hold separate conversations in parallel and walk in, out, and around those conversations just as easily as they would in real life," explains the site.

In other words, if two friends "walk" to a different part of the map — options include San Francisco's Dolores Park and Times Square and are delightfully low-res — they can have a private conversation without all the other people on the call hearing. Essentially, by moving your avatar away from the others on the room map, you're talking a digital breather from the conversation.

It's surprisingly satisfying, and, like real life, allows you to have unplanned private conversations with friends while still hanging in a larger group setting.

The three digital avatars are near each other in the middle of the street, thus the three callers can hear and see each other. Credit: online town

While obviously none of the maps are a true substitute for actually kicking it with a group of friends in the park, Online Town provides a better simulacrum of real-life hangs than many of its well-funded alternatives.

The project, launched by three friends on April 3 under the company banner of Siempre, was born out of a desire to stay connected. They received some seed funding last year, and that, plus their own savings, is what's keeping this project afloat.

"[We're] three friends from school who have been working for the past year to find ways to have better long-term relationships with our friends, families, and communities, even when they're not around us physically or by default," explained Online Town co-creator Kumail Jaffer over email. "With the quarantine, we saw this problem space get a lot more severe, not just for the people closest to us but also for society at large."

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Jaffer, and his co-creators Phillip Wang and Cyrus Tabrizi, built the first version of Online Town in a single day. According to Jaffer, the name seemed fun. "Not a super calculated decision," he wrote.

At the moment, Online Town isn't monetized and there is no plan to change that. "We don't have a [monetization] plan," explained Jaffer, "but we do have an intent."

Jaffer and his co-creators have thought about a few ways they could make money on Online Town without selling out their users' privacy.

"It means having as little data as possible about [users], never selling the little data that we do have, not doing any 'attention-hacking' (which probably means no advertising) etc," he wrote. "An example of how that could work is if we only ever charged large events or charged organizations on a per-person, per-room area, or per-time interval basis."

Choose your location. Credit: screenshot / online town

Notably, as with any chatting tool, the issue of privacy is of great importance. It's a lot harder to have an easygoing chat with friends if you think strangers are listening in, after all.

To that end, Jaffer assured us that both he and his co-creators take their users' privacy seriously and make every effort to protect and respect it.

"The video and audio for Online Town is transmitted using WebRTC, almost entirely peer-to-peer," he wrote. "When it is transmitting peer-to-peer, we have no way to access the video and audio at all — it never touches our servers, and furthermore is encrypted end to end using DTLS."

Which, hey, that's pretty good! In fact, because it's peer-to-peer, it has a one-up on Zoom. There's one small catch, though.

"[Under] certain network configurations, it is not possible to establish a peer-to-peer connection," added Jaffer. "In such situations (I don't know precisely what percentage of connections this represents, but I have seen a statistic that this is 10% of home connections) we use a functionality of WebRTC called TURN, which relays video and audio through a server that we control. In this case, the video and audio is still encrypted end-to-end using DTLS, so we cannot decode the contents of the video or audio even if it is passing through our servers."

SEE ALSO: How to use Jitsi Meet, an open source Zoom alternative

In other words, your video and audio conversations in Online Town are presumably safe from prying eyes and ears. As always, though, if you're discussing truly sensitive material (like medical information), there are likely more secure options available that you should use first.

But hey, if you just want to have a beer with some friends at the park? It's totally cool, pandemic and all, because this is Online Town, baby.