Calla – spatial video conferencing software based on Jitsi Meet
Does anyone remember Metaplace,[1] circa 2009? It was an isometric 2.5D-ish "virtual world" that, if it shipped today, would probably be pitched as a sort of Roblox competitor for building games and interactive installations within a virtual space. (At the time it compared itself to Second Life, which either baffled people who didn't know what it was or turned off people who did.)<p>I used it briefly in 2009 and one of the things we tried to do with it was exactly this — spatial voicechat in a virtual environment with contrived "physical" modeling of spaces to 
adjust how sound travels. (This also reminds me of TeamSpeak's spatial integrations from around the same era.)<p>I know it's the pandemic that's inspired a ton of these projects, but they've been around in some form since live voice-over-IP came about and haven't really taken off in non-game applications.<p>What keeps blocking them from mainstreaming? I suspect maybe it's adding contrived physical interactions to the already high relative overhead of meeting virtually, but I'm not sure if that's just a problem for me. I could see myself enjoying something like this but not many others on my team seeing enough value to take the efficiency hit of having either zero or multiple open voice channels that do away with the abstraction.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.engadget.com/2008-10-22-massively-interviews-raph-koster-on-the-state-of-metaplace.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.engadget.com/2008-10-22-massively-interviews-rap...</a>