Immersive chat startups have a very different vision for the future of voice

What happens when startups look to build on the trendiness of podcasting and social audio platforms while injecting them with some of virtual reality’s weirdness? Turns out, plenty of founders are already experimenting with that strange question.

As audio-centric platforms garner investor interest, virtual reality founders of old are trying to push 3D audio as the next evolution, presenting the tech in a way that looks entirely different from today’s voice chat platforms. Though some of these efforts have been in the works for a while, the fledgling platforms are a lot more interesting, as social efforts like Clubhouse take flight and investors continue to eat up audio startups.

They also build on Apple’s recent announcement that it’s bringing 3D audio support to the AirPods Pro, a feature which could allow immersive audio platforms to push even further toward realism.

3D audio is a technology that manipulates the sounds a user is hearing to correspond with where their ears (or an avatar’s) are positioned relative to those noise-making objects. The tech gives users a greater sense of spatial presence and has, to date, been primarily used to improve AR/VR experiences with Google, Facebook and Valve among the companies that have shipped their own 3D audio toolkits.

As more startups look to leverage the tech, they’re finding that adjusting audio based on how close you’re getting to another user onscreen can make it pretty easy to leave and join groups, clustering in apps like people would in real-world conversations.

Existing group video chat solutions are a wall of frames jumping for your attention and group audio feels the same with the frequencies and interruptions stacking on top of each other. A more spatialized vision of audio platforms could present big opportunities for company-wide meetings but it could also shape digital events, allowing users to drag and drop an avatar into different panels of speakers at a digital conferences or next to friends at a particular stage for a digital music festival.

The voice chat apps of 2020 are largely stuck with early 2000s-era music player UIs and some startups are exploring the question of how those interfaces could evolve dramatically.

This week, Second Life co-founder Philip Rosedale announced the new direction for his heavily funded social startup High Fidelity. In one of the buzzword-iest pivots to date, the blockchain virtual reality startup has transitioned to an immersive audio platform. The new platform eschews the startup’s creepy avatar system for little profile photo dots that can be moved around a physical environment and clustered into conversation bubbles with audio from a user growing louder the closer you move your own avatar to it.

Image Credits: High Fidelity

It’s a strange and dramatic pivot for High Fidelity, which has raised around $73 million from investors to date, but it’s another signal that 3D audio might be underdeveloped as a platform. It’s also a sign that elements of virtual reality design could start trickling down into desktop and mobile design, pushing more apps to embrace 3D environments populated with avatar representations.

Teooh, an avatar chat product for mobile, announced last month that it had raised $4.5 million in funding from Spark Capital and General Catalyst. The company’s immersive mobile app places users in a 3D avatar environment and allows users to bounce around from table to table and chat and emote with users they’re sitting by. It’s a surprisingly pleasant experience and it feels like there’s more to be discovered in taking the lessons from Xbox Live chat and injecting them into a game-like environment where the game is just a catalyst for the conversation.

Social VR apps are in some ways ruined by their immersion; they have to do so much to capture your attention and hold it because in VR you can’t grab your phone and check Instagram when the conversation comes to a crawl. Bringing those same apps to mobile triggers a different part of the brain, giving users the feeling that they’re at the table listening to their friends and colleagues, but adding the freedom of loosening the absolute attention of VR or the always-on video feed inside Zoom.

Image Credits: Teooh

Many of these startups are aiming to create a different type of platform for chat while solving some of video chat’s real problems. Zoom is great for large groups when most participants are listening to a handful of speakers, but things can get uncontrollably messy when multiple conversations start happening. Features like Breakout Rooms allow Zoom hosts to arrange groups for individual conversations but new companies are aiming to combat this more rigid design with products that allow participants to walk up to new groups or insert themselves into a new conversation on the web.

These early platforms feel like experimentations, and while their current iterations don’t appear to be the end-all-be-all of immersive audio, they do feel like they’re on to something experience-wise. Avatar-based platforms look more than a little goofy by design, but as investors rally around the idea that the next massive social network might look more like Fortnite than Facebook, these startups are asking whether the next Zoom or Slack might look more like a game too.