I built a new version of my fun spatial 3D online meeting app
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Hi HN!flat.social is a fun spatial online meeting app for remote teams and communities. It's largely built like a web multiplayer game, and the 3D virtual spaces are highly customisable with elements and activities (I recently added surfing!).Live demo to try it out: https://app.flat.social/f/demo-flatHere's a quick demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeinBNqL23sIt's a solo, bootstrapped project built with Three.js, LiveKit and Rapier for physics. I built the first version during the pandemic and posted it here back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31833415I had a couple of months off this year, so I locked myself in an (almost) jungle house in Brazil and rebuilt it into what I've always wanted it to be.Would love to hear what you think!
HN · launched Sep 17, 2026 · 98 upvotes (top 8%) · 0 views
Niche: video chat and messaging apps · 100 launches, 10 in the last 7 days ▼ -47% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Communication
- B2C
- Not AI
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 100 launches in video chat and messaging apps →
Could you build this?
Partial A basic 2D spatial canvas is vibe-codeable, but a fluid 3D multiplayer game environment with WebGL rendering and low-latency spatial WebRTC audio/video is hard to build reliably.
What it would actually take: The application relies on Three.js/Babylon.js for client 3D rendering and physics, combined with an authoritative multiplayer server (Node.js/Go with Colyseus or custom WebSockets) for state synchronization and collision. Media streaming requires a Selective Forwarding Unit (SFU like LiveKit or mediasoup) with positional audio DSP calculations running in real time. Building this requires expertise in 3D graphics, game networking, and real-time WebRTC infrastructure.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Gather, Katmai, Slack, WorkAdventure, Discord
Concerns raised: Motion sickness from 3D views, Virtual office fatigue and distraction, High CPU usage and stuttering on landing page, Signup failure / 403 verification error, Welcome map is overly complex
Feature requests: Ability to rotate camera around the map, Flat 2D UI option, Lean more into social and gaming aspects
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 183 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #12 of 184 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 319 days after the earliest competitor.
- flat.social · ph · 2026-09-16 · 99 upvotes · similarity 0.68
- Geofenced chat communities anyone can create · hn · 2025-11-09 · 57 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Radius · hn · 2026-09-20 · 168 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- A geofence-based social network app 6 years in development · hn · 2026-01-08 · 78 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Fluxer · hn · 2026-01-02 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- The Social Hub · ph · 2026-09-06 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Social Kingdom · ph · 2026-11-04 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- FourthSpace · hn · 2026-04-22 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.43
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