I built a new version of my fun spatial 3D online meeting app
Details
- External ID
- 49740047
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I built a new version of my fun spatial 3D online meeting app
- Website domain
- flat.social
- Launched
- Sept. 17, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 98
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9218500797448166
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 21, 2026, 5:02 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 21, 2026, 5:02 p.m.
Description
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!
Enrichment
- Theme
- niche social and community platforms
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Communication
- Audience
- B2B
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- spatial 3d meeting space for remote teams
- Manually corrected
- False
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 — 86 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #8 of 87 (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
- The Social Hub · ph · 2026-09-06 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- 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 0.45
- FourthSpace · hn · 2026-04-22 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Agentic Engineered Social Connections and Travel App · hn · 2026-09-28 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.42
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.