jducoeur

Hey -- Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, BlueJeans and all the rest? Here's a suggestion for an enhancement. Pay some attention.

Over the past couple of days, Kate and I have watched our three favorite comedy-news shows -- Last Week Tonight, Full Frontal, and The Late Show (by the various heirs of Jon Stewart) -- as they tried running with the new "no audiences" restriction. Suffice it to say, it wasn't a raging success for any of them. They were missing a spark, and it isn't something that a canned laugh track could provide -- serious comics work in synergy with their audiences, and lacking an audience is a rehearsal, not a show.

And the thing is, it's the same thing that we found when running NE Scala. The conference was solidly successful, but the lack of audience interactivity was kind of unfortunate; in particular, doing a conference without applause is just plain weird. We substituted using emoji in Slack, and that wasn't terrible: I found an "inclusive clap" emoji that the community collectively decided they liked, so we got a wall of emoji at the end of each talk. But it's not the same.

This seems like an entirely solvable problem.

The problem is, most (all?) meeting software is kind of all-or-nothing. Either it's in "conference room" mode, where everyone is speaking as equals, or it's in "webinar" mode, where one person is presenting and most people are muted. (Zoom turns out to have a more nuanced version of webinar mode, where you can have multiple presenters, but it's still very broadcast-y.) This makes sense for office environments.

It's a poor representation of real life presentations, though, and sucks for many use cases that have very suddenly gone remote. What we need is an "auditorium" mode.

The idea is to soften the borders a bit. Here's one possibility. The presenter(s) are still first among equals, the only ones with a full mike. But the audience are not entirely silenced. Instead, the audience mikes are, by default, enabled, but at maybe 1/10th normal volume. So noises from an individual audience member are pretty quiet, but they are additive: if everyone laughs or applauds at the same time, the collective response comes out loud. That simulates a real auditorium, where the un-miked audience are audible only when they're working together.

It would take some research and experimentation to get it right, and I'm sure some nuances would be needed. It could be improved with some AI that allows desireable sounds (applause, laughter) but auto-silences crying babies and garbage trucks in the background. But the basic idea seems sound, and it would result in a much friendlier environment for doing a "show" remotely like this. It can't be all that hard, and right at the moment, it feels like a killer app.

(Yes, you could simulate something like it by having canned laugh/applause tracks, and have audience members pressing buttons to enable those. But I suspect the timing would be wrong: pressing that button would be an intellectual response, not an instinctive one, and the split-second difference would probably matter.)

Stretch goal: provide visual feedback as well. Most meeting software now provides what I still think of as "Brady Bunch mode" (we called it that when we first designed it at Convoq, back around 2005 (yes, I worked on one of the earliest meeting-software platforms)), where you see the faces of several people. In "auditorium mode", you would show live thumbnails of everybody who had their cameras on (presumably up to some limit, but it could be a lot more than today), each rather tiny. To make this make sense from a bandwidth POV, the audience's clients would send a fairly low-res feed. But the presenter and, if they wanted, the audience members, could see each other, providing that underlying sense of how people are reacting.

Even after the current crisis, I'd love to have this. I'm pondering how to run next year's NE Scala in a "hybrid mode", with the usual in-person audience of a couple hundred people but also enabling a lot of folks to participate remotely. Giving that remote audience this sort of live, warm feedback mechanism -- knowing that their laughter and applause is heard in the physical auditorium along with that of the people who are physically present -- would go a long ways towards making that more real.

So -- y'all are in competition to produce the best meeting software, and this is your moment. Here's a new competitive feature. Ready, set, go...

You know how sometimes, you look at some aspect of modern life and go, "This was science fiction when I was a kid"?

Well, right now -- with everybody living in their own little pods and all of my social events suddenly moving to cyberspace because of a world-side plague? Yeah.

Not all science fiction is happy-making.

(Although on the bright side, thank heavens for the modern Internet. Not many years ago, this would have been far more unpleasantly isolating.)

... so let's play a purely-speculative game. Which companies or categories are likely to do well out of this crisis? (It's totally cheating, but for purposes of the game you may assume that they will find ways around their labor shortages. (In reality, I suspect that's going to be a Problem.))

Don't count Amazon -- it's too obvious.

I'll lead off with: manufacturers of home exercise equipment. People who are used to going to the gym every day are going to find that iffy for the time being; some are going to decide that it's time to get that treadmill or weight set for the house.