Hello HN,

This is a tiny little thing that me and a frequent collaborator [0] wanted to express in these challenging times. What if people miss something as awkward and forgettable as elevator small talk?

Right now, there are virtual places where we can meet, collaborate, do yoga, talk about books, watch content together, and rave. This virtual space gives you an analog that is a little more from the daily inbetween times.

After long days of video calls at work, we ended up doing more video calls each evening to get this wrapped up. Overall this small concept took four weeks to finish. In the process I primarily learned that there have been notches in screens for a few years now.

The whole thing is built with Clojure and ClojureScript. And largely leveraged Sente [1], a wonderful front+back end WebSocket story. The characters are customized from the amazing Open Peeps library [2]. And there is some more info in the (?) on the website for the curious.

I am curious about what this community thinks about little, possibly zen, distractions like this?

[0]: https://ameliedinh.com/

[1]: https://github.com/ptaoussanis/sente

[2]: https://www.openpeeps.com/

Love the idea, couple ideas.

1. Restrict it to 3-4 people max in each elevator. 2. Add in audio and close the room in 1 minute.

Thanks!

Audio is definitely something we want. Had a nice elevator bell lined up! Will try to get that added sometime this week.

re #1, it would definitely be more usable with higher visitor traffic. One of our goals was to let people be in the same elevator if they send it to their friends, at the moment that is done by only having one elevator haha. Not ideal!

Love it. I'm going to share this with my coworkers.

I like things like this because they're different. It feels like the sort of silly website you'd stumble across in the early 2000s. But I agree with some of the other posters that the limitation of choosing from canned phrases makes it feel boring almost immediately.

Something to consider: maybe being able to string random small-talk related words or phrases together, ala magnetic poetry[0], would result in more interesting chatter.

[0]: https://jayisgames.com/review/farragomate.php

Nice idea.

The fact that some of the people have no eyes and a weird sort of eye thing for a nose is confusing.

Also there are too many people in the elevator for the necessary awkward silence between comments.

After a certain amount of small talk you should get awarded the opportunity to actually choose what to say. Thats kindof how it works IRL.

It's definitely receiving slightly more traffic than usual right now ;)

I came expecting a web app showcasing Smalltalk, the language. Boy was I confused for a second haha.

I really don't understand.

Are other people in the elevator operated by other actual users online, or are they randomly generated? Honestly, it's indistinguishable from random.

Are you supposed to be "conversing" with the other thought bubbles that appear? Using the 10 phrases you're allowed to use, which because they're meaningless you cannot tell whether someone is actually responding to your input or just a bot putting up phrases?

The sentiment is nice, but I have to say, 4 weeks to build this seems... unfortunate.

my understanding is that "indistinguishable from random" and "meaningless ... bot putting up phrases" is the critique of small talk that this art piece is trying to get at?

Yes that's true -- but if the authors of this spent 4 weeks coding up something to allow people to input phrases and have them appear to others dynamically and have them "respond" (all of the complexity of a chat interface and backend), only to not be able to tell the difference between that and random non-interactive output... what was the point of all that work?

Maybe I'm not getting something about the UI that is obvious.

It was definitely a challenge to communicate that everyone was a human in there. (As far as humans can be trusted ;)

Later in the design we added some details to hopefully get that across to as many people as possible. The biggest being "connect to other humans" that bounces in over the elevator button before you can call it. The others are maybe a bit too tucked away in the info (?) area.

I think with the amount of traffic in the last 12hrs everyone does start to look like a bot though!

I mean, thanks for your effort, but I still am puzzled as to the purpose of making this a complex interactive conversation platform... when the phrases are not able to convey a conversation and it appears random to the participants. It's a lot of behind-the-scenes work / infrastructure for something that is... not useful as a conversational tool.

Fun, it would be nice to have less people per room as right now it's very crowded (on mobile)

It's actually a 'single shard' universe. (Sorry bad EVE joke) But yes, its a bit stuffy in there right now!

What's that smell?

(Seriously, this is adorable. Great work!)

Thank you! Really glad you liked it!

This is pretty cool, I’d love to see similar things like this.

why would you like to see more?

tbh I don't get the point of this...it's boring and useless(for me)... it's nice project for learning or demonstrating the technical aspects behind it...

Neat idea, good execution.