The Interledger Community 🌱: Skittish

Skittish: A Virtual Venue for Playful Events — Grant Report #2

Andy Baio — Sat, 16 Oct 2021 01:12:07 +0000

Introduction

Hello again, GTFW/Web Monetization Community! I'm Andy Baio, the founder of Skittish, a playful virtual space for online events. In case you're not familiar with it, Skittish is a colorful game-like 3D environment where you play as cute animal avatars and talk with your real voice using stereo spatial audio.

Hanging at The Pond at the GFTW Community Demo Party

Project Update

Since our first project update in late February, so much has happened that it's hard to summarize it all.

In short, we've built a product that I'm really proud of and have run tons of events, big and small, ranging from big conferences, a film festival, a game design camp, internal corporate events, unconferences, and casual meetups. Thousands of people have been invited to Skittish's private beta, and it's been used for several Web Monetization/GFTW events, which has been great to see.

Grant for the Web Pizza Party

We've added dozens of new features and improvements since the last update, some of which I'll detail below. It's improved radically over the last few months, based largely on the feedback of beta testers.

It hasn't been easy: it's taken several months longer to launch publicly than I originally predicted as we've tried to improve the experience for everyone, fix inevitable bugs/UX issues, and add critical features.

But fortunately, we've kept our operating costs lower than expected, letting us stretch our grant funds considerably further to cover the additional time. Our grant period was initially set to end in mid-April, which we extended to mid-July and then finally mid-September.

Progress on objectives

There were three goals outlined in the initial proposal:

Create a compelling and playful virtual space for attendees and artists to express themselves creatively, interacting with old and new friends online in ways that aren't currently possible in real-life or with existing platforms.

Of our three main objectives, I feel the most confident about this one. We've seen many events run in Skittish, and each one has used the tools and features we've developed to uniquely customize the space and make it feel special for their event.

There are many people experimenting with spatial audio and unusual virtual spaces right now, but Skittish feels special and unique in how it works when groups come together there.

Provide a source of reliable, meaningful income for artists, performers, and organizers interested in adapting real-world experiences to a new virtual space.

Since it's still early in its life, this is a difficult goal to evaluate. We've had many events in Skittish, but only a handful have charged for access — most were free, sponsored by the companies and organizations that were running the events.

I hope that Skittish finds an audience of creators and event organizers using it to make a living, but it may end up being something that's used primarily by companies/organizations that can afford to use it for bigger events without charging for access. Time will tell.

Build a sustainable independent business with a tangible revenue model, retaining creative and financial control of the project while supporting a small thriving team.

This is still a work-in-progress. We've done some paid events and added Stripe integration for self-service upgrades, but with Skittish still in private beta, it will take more time to become a sustainable business. I feel confident about the revenue model, but it'll take some time to reach profitability.

Key activities

The list of features and improvements to Skittish since the initial update is pretty massive, I can't possibly include them all here — but here are some of the highlights.

High Fidelity. One of the biggest changes was an architecture decision: deciding to move away from native WebRTC for audio and use High Fidelity, a new commercial service for scalable spatial audio from the creator of Second Life. We were encountering a number issues with WebRTC audio — cross-browser compatibility, audio quality, echo cancellation, network problems with VPNs, and most critically, scalability. We were encountering issues with 15+ audio streams, let alone the hundreds we hoped to reach. High Fidelity eliminated all those problems, with extremely high-quality audio. As a pay-per-minute service, it limited the free tier we could offer, but this felt like a worthy tradeoff.

Stages. We added stages, allowing event organizers to broadcast their voice to everyone in the space, regardless of distance. We also added the ability to assign a speaker role to any attendee, or open the stage up to the public.

Channel Zones. Skittish supports up to 150 people talking in a single room, but we added resizable private audio spaces called Channel Zones, allowing you to split a room into multiple audio zones, each with their own 150 person limit.

Channel Zones at the Portland Indie Game Squad meetup

Stripe Billing. In addition to Web Monetization, we added Stripe integration to let people upgrade to a paid plan with expanded capacity and audio quotas. In the background, this required a lot of work on analytics and tracking to accurately measure usage.

Event Privacy. Previously, all Skittish events were public, but we added a password option, as well as an invite-only modes, in which people can only join the event if their email is added to Skittish directly or on a shared Google Sheets spreadsheet.

Text Chat and Emotes. People wanted a way to talk to one another even if they were too far away to be heard audibly, so we added global text chat, and simple emotes display an emoji above your character, good for non-verbal gestures while watching programming together or listening to talks.

Roles and Permissions. We added special Admin and Speaker roles, allowing you to grant special access to the asset editor, moderation tools, video screens, and stages to users in real-time.

Signs. We added interactive signs which can fit a couple words, but can be customized with paragraphs of text and links, suitable for event information, schedules, codes of conduct, or anything else.

Moderation Tools. We added tools for event organizers to mute or ban problem attendees, remove their messages from chat, or ban them from chat entirely.

Focus Video. We frequently heard that people wanted to see the embedded video screens better, so we made a way to change the camera angle to zoom into the videos without leaving the environment entirely.

Watching a talk at the Akita Grantee Hangout

Opening/Closing Events. Previously, all Skittish events were open all the time. When an event’s closed, admins and speakers can still join the event, allowing organizers to customize the space and rehearse with speakers. Anyone else joining will go in a waiting room until doors open. When the event's over, closing the event will swiftly kick everyone.

Editor Improvements. Our world editor was refined to allow admins to natively upload 3D assets, changing their colors, position, and collider information, and to allow any event organizer to rotate and move objects after they're placed.

Improved Video Screens. We added volume controls and support for livestreams from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch, with all video synchronized to all attendees.

Custom Assets. We commissioned our first original 3D models from the talented artist, Joi Fulton, to give additional options for editors. Those grant-funded assets are included in the repo for anyone to use.

There's more, but I'll stop there. Needless to say, the changes have been pretty massive and development moved quickly.

Communications and marketing

While in private invite-only beta, we've limited our communications to occasional blog posts and [social media], but sometimes the press found us. After our initial announcement was covered by outlets like The Verge and Wired, we were later interviewed by TechCrunch, TechRepublic, and Discourse.

I spoke about Skittish at several events, most presenting from within Skittish itself: GAIA, TBD, New Relic's FutureStack (which also used Skittish as their social space), and Grant for the Web's Community Call, which can be viewed below, a snapshot of what Skittish looked like in late June.

I expect to do a more concerted marketing push and outreach once we open publicly later this month.

What’s next?

This is our final grant report, but Skittish is just getting started. Our next near-term goals are focusing on opening publicly with a more frictionless demo and public website, improving accessibility, adding deeper options for customizing the world to feel visually distinct, and adding new interactive objects and gameplay to change what people can do in the space.

We've also recently secured sponsorship to cover the cost of running free community events for non-profits or other independent creators who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford it.

I'm also excited to start running our own events in Skittish, partly because I enjoy bringing people together, but also to push the boundaries in how Skittish can be used and demonstrate its capabilities.

Final Comments

As we wrap up this stage of our development, I'm feeling very hopeful, ready to move forward to try to reach a wider audience and sustainable revenue on our own, building Skittish into a long-term independent business.

We've also open-sourced our frontend, backend, and 3D assets under the Apache License 2.0, everything that we worked on during the grant period. We hope people can learn from it and find it useful.

If you'd like to reach me, feel free to PM me or email me directly at andy@skittish.com.

Getting this off the ground could not have been possible without Grant for the Web's support, and we're eternally grateful.

Skittish: A Virtual Venue for Playful Events — Grant Report #1

Andy Baio — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 20:01:21 +0000

Introduction

Hi, GTFW/Web Monetization Community! I'm Andy Baio, the founder of Skittish, a playful virtual space for online events. Skittish brings people together into a game-like interactive 3D environment that’s designed from the ground up for socially-driven events, big and small.

If you're wondering what that looks like, here's a little tour.

A week ago, we finally came out of hiding and announced the project we'd secretly worked on since our grant was announced in October.

The reaction was a bit of a whirlwind, including media coverage from The Verge, Wired, and New World Notes.

The resulting flood of interest was overwhelming, and I've spent the last week talking to dozens of interesting event organizers, artists/creators, and organizations itching to use Skittish to bring together their own communities.

It’s currently in private beta, but you can sign up now for updates and announcements, or follow @SkittishHQ on Twitter and Instagram.

The last few months have been a bit of a whirlwind, and this is our first Grant Report, so there's a lot to cover. Before getting into the update, I want to explain a little bit about what Skittish is and hopes to accomplish.

Background

For those who don't know me, I'm the co-creator of XOXO, an experimental festival celebrating independently-produced art and technology, held (almost) every year in Portland, Oregon. (I've also done a bunch of other things you might have heard of.)

After the pandemic cancelled our festival last year, I started attending a bunch of virtual events, mostly out of boredom and longing for connecting to other people.

Unfortunately, many of them were pretty uninspiring, basically just fancy webinars with breakout rooms for Zoom. Others were just livestreams with little room for social interaction beyond a global chat room.

Almost all of them left me feeling like I’d either sat through a long meeting or watched a long YouTube video. Was this even an event? Did I actually attend anything?

As depressing as most virtual events were, there were three bright spots of creative experimentation happening over the last year:

Experimental Events. The brilliant MUD-like environment created for Roguelike Celebration and the ongoing series of LIKELIKE events showed how event spaces could draw inspiration from games to great effect.
Proximity Chat. Second Life has supported spatial voice chat for nearly 15 years, but a crop of experimental new platforms started using spatial/positional audio and video to make virtual parties feel more real.
Social Games. Approachable games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Among Us, and Fall Guys were breakout stars of the pandemic, giving us new ways to connect to with friends when we couldn’t be together in person.

There are some amazing projects out there, but I started outlining a hybrid of these ideas: an online event venue for large-scale gatherings that used spatial audio, didn’t assume people were comfortable being on camera, with real-time customization of the space, and built in a 3D engine for a more immersive game-like feel.

More than anything, I wanted it to be optimized for fun: interesting to explore on its own, make new friends, and a vibrant place for creators and event organizers to bring together their communities in a new way.

Grant for the Web

As I was working on the first prototype, it was clear this was far more than a side project, and I’d need additional resources to fund development and design.

Desigan Chinniah encouraged me to apply for Grant for the Web, and I submitted a grant proposal to build a virtual event space, in which attendees can financially support creators, organizers, and events they love using the Web Monetization API (or traditional payment methods).

At the time I proposed it, Skittish didn't yet have a name:

Virtual Venue for Playfully Immersive Events in the Browser
Building a new virtual space to organize and attend large-scale immersive and playful real-time conferences, festivals, and performances in the browser, with a focus on casual social interaction with audio and video. By integrating the Web Monetization API, attendees can financially support the artists, organizers, and events they love simply by attending events or exploring the spaces they've designed."

Three months later, I was floored to discover I'd received a Flagship Grant! By early November, I received the funds and was able to bring on a contract developer to help out.

Project Update

In December, I scrapped my initial Three.js prototype and worked with creative technologist Mike Bodge to build the new version in react-three-fiber, a powerful React renderer for Three.js, with a thriving community and helper libraries. Unfortunately, existing client work took Mike off the project a month later.

Through his work on react-three-game-engine, a budding game engine for react-three-fiber, I found Brisbane-based developer Simon Hales, who started working with me on Skittish in January. He hit the ground running, initiated a complete TypeScript rewrite, and we've worked together to add much of the functionality you can see in the current app.

Current Features

It’s still early in development, but this is what Skittish supports so far:

A game-like interactive 3D environment, with a fixed camera perspective, simple navigation controls, and animated avatars
Positional stereo audio, allowing you wander in and out of conversations naturally, with sound playing relative to your current position
Inline creation and editing tools for collaboratively customizing the world in real-time with 3D objects
Embedded inline videos with spatial audio for watching or listening to livestreamed or pre-recorded media from YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, Vimeo, Soundcloud, and more
Support for multiple interconnected rooms

Web Monetization Support

Critically, Skittish already supports Web Monetization, allowing event creators to add a payment pointer to receive streaming payments from anyone experiencing their event.

If they don't add a payment pointer, we use Skittish's pointer as the default, allowing people to support Skittish directly while attending events. You can see what that looks like in the video below.

Progress on objectives

There were three goals outlined in the initial proposal:

Create a compelling and playful virtual space for attendees and artists to express themselves creatively, interacting with old and new friends online in ways that aren't currently possible in real-life or with existing platforms.

So far, we've made tremendous progress in the first goal. We've tested Skittish with hundreds of friends, acquaintances, and potential organization partners, and the feedback has been universally positive. It's clear we've accomplished the goal of making something compelling and unique, even at this early stage.

Provide a source of reliable, meaningful income for artists, performers, and organizers interested in adapting real-world experiences to a new virtual space.

It remains to be seen whether it will become a meaningful source of income for artists and performers, and we're still working on deciding how to charge those types of individual creators, but there's clear demand. We believe that Skittish is a more compelling experience for immersive events that's worth paying for, but we'll only know with time after launching publicly and people start using it.

Build a sustainable independent business with a tangible revenue model, retaining creative and financial control of the project while supporting a small thriving team.

There's a clear path to revenue for Skittish, and we've already secured two paying events starting in May. Charging event organizers is an obvious model, but there's enormous potential in addressing the needs of individual creators/artists and brands/sponsors, as well as running original events ourselves. It's very plausible that Skittish will be sustainable, with monthly revenue fully covering expenses, by September.

Key activities

There was one key deliverable cited in my original proposal:

"Within a six month period, the goal is to launch and start running monetized events on the platform."

We received grant funding in early November, and despite a complete rewrite in January, we're on track to hit that goal, continuing to run private beta events over the next couple months and our first paid public events in May.

The milestones in our timeline have evolved slightly, as some things ended up significantly easier than expected and others more challenging or became less critical.

Milestones completed:

Proof-of-concept prototype with base 3D space, spatial audio/video
Build/deploy process for rapid iteration
In-world avatars and object placement
Initial registration system
YouTube/Twitch overlays for one-to-many broadcast streaming
Web Monetization support
First private alpha tests with small meetups in the space
Ability to link rooms together
Large-scale load tests with bots

Not yet complete:

Text chat
Interior rooms
In-engine tools for customizing floors/walls/objects
Avatar customization

Communications and marketing

We only started talking about Skittish last Tuesday, but have been thrilled with the response so far. We don't have a marketing budget, but a combination of word-of-mouth and organic press coverage has led to nearly 2,000 people signing up for our announcement list in the last week.

As I mentioned before, we received profiles in The Verge, Wired, and New World Notes.

Most exciting to me are the artists and event organizers who have reached out directly by email and DMs, expressing interest in using Skittish. Some of those have unusual requirements, but most are well-suited to Skittish even in its current beta state.

What’s next?

Our immediate goal is to get Skittish ready for a public launch, which requires a combination of new features, fixing bugs, design customization, and load testing. We plan to spend the next three months resolving these issues, while doing a series of increasingly larger free beta tests.

New features. There are a number of high-priority features left to make Skittish a more robust communication platform, including moderation tools, accessibility options, text chat, private video rooms, and native one-to-many broadcasting.
Bug fixes. Chrome, Firefox, and Safari each have unique and annoying bugs associated with consistent positional audio, as well as some nagging issues with some clients periodically losing their connections to each other.
Design customization. Right now, Skittish's world design is pretty spare. We're currently looking to hire a 3D environmental artist to help design the Skittish space, making it fun to explore and addressing common use cases, and allowing event creators to customize their event space.
Load testing. We need to continue doing testing with larger groups to identify the bottlenecks in Skittish's performance and to understand the maximum capacity it will support consistently.

What community support would benefit your project?

We now have a sizable group of willing beta testers, but we don't have anyone deeply familiar with both events and the Web Monetization API, to help think through creative uses of it beyond what we're doing right now.

We're also looking for:

Creators. I’m intent on making Skittish into something that individual artists and creators can use to bring together their own community, whether it’s debuting a new video on YouTube, doing a book reading, a live concert, or playtesting a new game — and make money doing it. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, get in touch.

Event Organizers. After having co-organized seven years of XOXO, I empathize with the plight facing event organizers right now who are struggling to convince attendees and sponsors to pay for lackluster events. I want to make events that are unique and valuable, worth the time and energy to show up for, and worth paying for, so you can continue to support yourself doing what you love. If you have an idea for an event you’d like to run in Skittish, I’d love to hear it.

Environmental Artist. I’m looking to immediately hire a freelance 3D environmental artist to help design a space for everyone to explore, somewhere between a festival grounds and Disneyland—warm, approachable, and playful. Candidates will be comfortable working in flat-shaded low-polygon constraints optimized for the web. Aesthetically, I’m inspired by the wholesome games movement, and games like Alba, WATTAM, Untitled Goose Game, Ooblets, Windosill, Donut County, and I Am Dead. If that sounds like you, email me a link to your portfolio. Introductions welcome!

Conclusion

I'm extremely grateful to Grant for the Web for believing in this idea and making it possible. I'd love to hear any feedback you have about the project, feel free to leave a comment or get in touch with me directly. Thanks!