Topia - Video chat in a virtual world

💜 Topia more than words can convey. Here's been our journey so far... On May 9th, @dliebeskind texted me the link to Topia v0. Within weeks, we’d moved all of our gatherings and community in-world. On May 30th, it became the virtual venue for our engagement party. In June, I hosted my birthday party on/in Topia’s Burning Man demo. Through July, we started creating in-world apps and experiences. In August, we spent a week playing on Topia’s pixelated Playa. By September, we’d started investing in all types of “surreal estate”. In October, we were chased across worlds by Samara from The Ring. In November, my partner and I hosted our 11-day wedding festival in our world. Today, we’re hosting the Spatial Media Symposium entirely in-world. We are so happy and grateful for the endlessly expanding canvas for space creation that Topia enables. ‘World Building Services’ are now our agency’s primary revenue generator and we’re continuing to invest heavily in surreal estate. Today, you can share space with us (https://inc.one), the Topia team, and leaders from Second Life, Reddit, etc. in https://topia.io/producthunt. Come, let’s go for a walk.

Hi Everyone! Daniel here, co-founder and CEO of Topia. We’re excited to share a bit about our journey in creating Topia, the spaces we’re enabling, and where we plan to go. 👣 How we got here — We started Topia in March when we wanted a more meaningful way to connect face-to-face in a way that felt fun (and could still be used productively), while also being interactive, and more human. At the beginning of the pandemic, we turned to traditional video conferencing with our communities and quickly grew tired of using business tools to socialize, getting trapped on calls where only the loudest person talks, and….the zoom fatigue was real. We craved a more human way to bring people together, something that more closely resembled getting together in person. ⛓️ Rooms without walls — In Topia, you simply walk around to meet and talk to people. You aren’t confined to a single room where one person talks and everybody else has to listen. Seamlessly move in and out of conversations and experience spontaneous chats, unexpected meetups, and moments of serendipity. 🎨 Fully customize your world — Each world can be fully customized using our library of assets or ready-to-use templates or upload your own art or branding to make it uniquely yours. There is no limit to what you can create in Topia. 🤹‍♀️ Create interactive experiences — Relationships are built through shared experiences. Topia enables world owners to create fully interactive worlds by adding video, audio, embedding games or websites, or connecting a network of Topia worlds together. 🌎 Come explore with us today — We invite you to explore Topia today. We’re co-hosting a Spatial Media Symposium inside a world that we created just for the PH community. Hear from technology creators that have become space makers; creators from Second Life, General Assembly, Reddit, Ticketmaster, and more. To join, click this link: https://topia.io/producthunt. Topia is currently only available using Chrome browser on a desktop computer. Thanks for checking out Topia! ~Daniel

Hi, I’m John Zdanowski, former CFO of Second Life, General Assembly and numerous other startups now profitable or sold. I’m also a Founding Citizen of One Inc Cooperative. I met Topia and Daniel in-world through our community, One Inc Cooperative, and—through it—became a CFO advisor to, and an investor in, Topia. We’ve been gathering in Topia almost every day since. Topia’s basic ability to move around a world from conversation to conversation is simple and elegant. I’ve enjoyed going to events and serendipitously meeting new people during quarantine. The aspect of Topia that I’m the most excited about is the Creator Economy. Soon, Creators will be able to use Topia’s revenue share platform to monetize their worlds, events and artistic creation. I’m grateful for all the space Topia has made and am excited to support the company more and more as it continues to grow!

We are currently building a 1.500 people experience that will happen this week. We created over 100 custom assets already to make it feel like an adventure. Highly recommended and the team is very willing to listen and keep developing great stuff.

Topia is obvious. And it’s delightful. Back in April, Daniel shared an early version of Topia with the #Quaranteam community. It was an instant hit for our happy hours because it allowed us to communicate naturally, as we would in person. Since then, I've hosted everything from an Oxford alumni reception, to a COVID hackathon, to my best friends’s (super-intergenerational) 40th birthday. And in all cases, Topia causes smiles. You’re a chubby little creature popping a squat at a campfire, or strolling along a river running into friends. And that's WAY better than landing in a flatland of faces a video conference call. (And a guaranteed refreshing reprieve from our now-common enemy of Zoom fatigue.) Yes, it’s a more human way to Zoom. But what gets me excited is that Topia opens up an expansive landscape for designing truly social experiences. Consider the bar raised for online events -- no doubt, invites will be coming to our inboxes very soon!

Back in August I joined into the Topia world to watch the man burn and it was then that I recognized the magic of what you guys are doing here. I'm beyond happy and proud of @dliebeskind @cpsiaki to see this grow into something so meaningful. Keep up the momentum boys!

Like a lot of others I started building in Topia for Burning Man getting my camp into multiple of the multiverses including Build-a-Burn At https://vTogether.io we build collaborative working and social spaces across vr platforms and we love Topia Just in the last week we've built and hosted major events for https://technation.io/ and https://wearethecity.com/ in topia with the most fabulous feedback from all the guests This captures how Topia feels - and it is emotionally this real: "It was great. Replicating the networking in a fun and natural way is what has been missing from virtual events. This was every bit as random, fun and awkward as I remember pre-covid networking events to be, so congrats :) Huge success" - it's from Kate Russell. If you've ever watched Click, the weekly technology magazine programme on BBC World, that was Kate; she's one of the world's leading technology broadcasters, as well as a conference speaker (and creator of http://ferrettube.live !!). Kate sees a lot of tech PS. the Topia team are awesome to work with

I've been hosting virtual gatherings online since this #wholecovidthing started and Topia has been what has made them feel most real. The ability to organically move between conversations and discover things you didn't know you were looking for make for the most life like experience you could ask for. Much love to the Topia team and the amazing work they have done to build Our community!

Awesome, absolutely love the idea! Looking forward to play around with this!

This looks super cool. Great idea!! Looking forward to playing around with it once I've shared it with some friends. ?makers Would it be possible to integrate this with multiple twitch streams?