Case
Nader
In developmentSelf-hosted 3D proximity chat: your webcam is your head, you hear only whoever stands nearby.
What & why
A 3D world you wander through with a small group of friends. Your live webcam is your avatar's head, and you hear only the people standing close to you — walk away and their voice fades. It runs: several worlds, spatial audio, and you can join as a guest without an account. Self-hosted, in the spirit of Mibo, a 3D meeting place that disappeared. Nader is still very much in development — worlds and refinement keep being added — but you can play it already.
Video calling puts everyone in a grid; a drinks reception does not work that way. You want to be able to walk around, join a group, take someone aside for a moment. That calls for proximity as the control — and for self-hosting, so your friends' conversations do not end up with a platform that could vanish tomorrow, like the one this goes back to.
Approach
- You walk around a 3D scene with your webcam as your head; you see and hear others only as you come close.
- 3D scene in Three.js; video and audio peer-to-peer via WebRTC, with our own TURN relay as a fallback when a direct connection fails.
- Spatial audio with the WebAudio PannerNode: for each listener the right direction and the right volume, so distance becomes audible.
- Deliberately started with a peer-to-peer mesh for the fastest route to something working; if it gets too heavy with thirty people packed together, the switch to a media server is planned.
Technology
Images & demo
