Gather Reviews

It feels like a real place and it works well! Now I can finally stop finding a website for a virtual office now that I have my very own gather space :)

I just had a few minutes on this through my organisation. Seems a great idea and a lot of fun. We might subscribe to it.

Might become the next big thing. I was surprised how well it replicates office physical interaction. You need to experience it to really understand. And I could picture many other use case. I'm quite excited about it.

PROS: Looks pretty cute, has a social edge over the no-nonsense video conference apps like Zoom and MSTeams, excellent audio and good video quality, press Z for dance, many thoughtful features (but not as many as there should be), social setting audio simulation is super good

CONS: Can only walk in four directions, walking near others auto connects you to others' vid and mic feeds (this might give the feel of a real life setting where you can half-hear conversations you walk past, but here it just eats your processing power), could use many more thoughtful features (eg. option in settings to reset function keys, optional automatic ghost walking)

Overall, Gather is a great half-new idea that has been implemented to some success, and it will absolutely benefit from harvesting and considering opinions and suggestions from the community. Have a nice day :)

This works well for people missing their 'common room' or bar experience at conferences or events. Think 'milling' at a drinks party.... who might you bump into?

Would like to have more interactivity...

Vanessa Moss had the great idea of trying this out at last week's virtual meeting of the European Astronomical Society, where over 1800 astronomers from around the world registered. It felt like a natural way of 'meeting' fellow attendees and chatting, since you 'walk' up to them and can't hear (or video chat with) them until you're within the interaction radius. Re: adjusting this radius, perhaps right-clicking on the icon could lead to a drop-down set of options? And, psychologically, I think it would be better to have an 'exit' button rather than closing the web-browser tab/window in order to 'leave' the virtual venue. There are probably other tweaks that could be made too, but the developers are on the right track :)

Was excited to use this with our family but so confusing to use ! Hope you can make it more intuitive so more ppl can enjoy 👍

It's a nice idea, but the map just doesn't save. I spent an hour constructing a virtual environment, saving regularly, only to end up losing it all to a really old saved version. Hopefully when it is more stable and they've worked out the bugs it will be a great platform. But right now it's not reliable enough.

Nice Idea, all Browsers has enought compatible, but the developers are not experienced enough to work across browsers! Android and IOS are no longer usable, but why?!? No App im AppStore… Pats are gread but limited for Nothing! The Idea is unbelievable but the People behind there are nothing. This is so mad, kick the developers!

I just tried Gather Town. Was worth trying, but I don't think it works, at least not in its current form. You see/hear people based on how close they are to your avatar, but that means you can see/hear people that can't see/hear each other. This middle ground between organic and quantized is worse than either. The "interaction distance" feature is not easy enough to use to fix that. Also, there was a lot of connection problems.