At the end of a long day at the virtual office, are you itching to step out (virtually speaking) to grab a beer at a virtual happy hour?
Zoom “cocktail parties” and “happy hours” became popular in the spring as a means for coping with the stress of no bars, no school, and no human interaction besides your wife, husband, children, or roommates. But for many of us, being on webcam and staring at a screen is the last thing we want to do after hours of being on webcam and staring at a screen.
Have you done one of these? Sure, it’s fun to see friends or colleagues if you haven’t seen them in weeks or months. Maybe it feels a bit subversive to raise a glass of Jameson on the same web platform in which you usually share slides of quarterly sales projections. But there’s something unnatural about these “social events.”
The real malady of online “happy hours” is this: the single conversation.
You’ve found yourself in this horrible position in real life, even if you’ve never put your finger on the problem. Think of the awkward office goodbye party around cake. The main problem isn’t the printer in the corner, the fluorescent lights, or the presence of the boss. The main problem is that all 12 people are having one conversation, so that anyone who speaks is performing for the whole group.
Every Zoom, Facetime, or Google Hangouts happy hour is like that. No break-off conversations. No side jokes. No background noise.
One app is trying to fix that and make online socializing less stressful and more like real life.
High Fidelity keeps your webcam off, relies solely on audio, and marks each person with a colored dot.
“The delightful part is the audio: It’s 3-D and spatialized,” a writer at the New Yorker explained. “As you navigate a crowded High Fidelity space, you’ll hear different groups talking at the same time and at different volumes, depending on your location. You can speak to someone privately, by the pixelated hedges, or join a group of three gossiping by the pool.”
If you notice the friend you want to razz about the Bears-Packers game last weekend, you slide your dot across the “room,” and the audio in the app adjusts so that the two of you can hear one another, and maybe some dot nearby can overhear and hop in.
Maybe this can make social gatherings (and life) a little closer to normal. Cheers!
