Do you want to know what’s next for the game industry? Join gaming executives to discuss emerging areas of the industry at GamesBeat Summit Next in October. Register today.
Absurd:joy has launched its Tangle virtual collaboration platform for early access and has raised a new funding round of more than $4 million.
Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Absurd:joy started out as a game company founded by Owlchemy virtual reality gaming veterans Alex Schwartz and Cy Wise. They were frustrated by the lack of modern tools that allow teams to feel present, connected and collaborate remotely. While they worked to make games during the pandemic, they turned to create a remote work center called Tangle.
It serves as a virtual platform for teams to connect and collaborate from anywhere. It has been under testing since the company announced its $5.5 million financing in August 2021. And now anyone can download and use it.
“We were trying to make video games, and we got into the fortunate circumstance of building a full-featured communications platform,” said Schwartz. “I am very enthusiastic about the financing. We have over $10 million in funding right now. Until now, we kept the floodgates closed for people who wanted to try it.”
The goal is to reduce meetings and put people first, Schwartz said in an interview with GamesBeat. And the goal is to produce something that is more enjoyable for employees to use than the standard Zoom, Google Meet, Discord or Microsoft Teams.
“Everyone is tired of using the fragmented stack of tools that communicate remotely, like Zoom for video and Slack to send messages,” said Schwartz. “We built this thing to make it a lot easier to have moments of collaboration together and spend the day with the team you would normally sit next to in a physical space. Instead, we created this shared spatial audio-persistent world so you can be with your team and get things done.”
In contrast to those means of communication, Tangle is lively. It uses cartoonish animated avatars that you can choose to represent you in the office. Those avatars capture your facial movements when you speak, and you can use them in meetings when you don’t feel like going in front of the camera, Schwartz said. If you really need your camera, you have that option.
“We’re a bunch of designers focused on human psychology and experience,” Schwartz said. “We asked how we can just make this experience better. And we found that the most important thing was that people don’t actually want their video on all day.”
So the avatars can take over and you can know someone is listening because the avatars mimic their facial expressions. You don’t have to dress up for the camera. You also don’t want to feel like you’re being watched all day and that’s why everyone has a virtual office and you have to knock on the door and interrupt someone only when it’s okay.
As for 3D graphic animations for avatars, Absurd:joy tried to keep it simple. If you get too realistic, you’ll cross the eerie valley and it will start to look weird. If someone decides to open the office door, you’ll hear it through spatial audio and know that the person is now open for conversation.
You could say the timing is bad because the pandemic is over (OK, not really) and everyone is back in the office now (OK, neither is). But Schwartz thinks remote working is here to stay and has plenty of benefits. I recently got a demo at a big company and the parking lot was completely empty. Schwartz said many people would rather quit than return to the office.
“The pandemic was a catalyst for the change that was already taking place,” Schwartz said. “Once you realize that in these other ways you can be productive and be more flexible with employees, the only people who will argue the hardest for going back to offices will be all those people who have made those real estate investments. ”
Like Slack and Discord, but different
Schwartz likens Tangle’s journey to that of both Slack and Discord. Both companies started out making games, but they both started making communication tools that have become extremely popular.
Today’s tools are designed around dated video conferencing and heavy text communication. To meet the needs of modern remote workers, most teams need to use multiple platforms and piece together a fragmented set of disparate tools just to collaborate with their teams.
These tools were never designed for today’s remote use cases, which often leave employees with endless meetings and an overwhelming sense of loneliness.
Wanting to reimagine remote communication, they built Tangle, a permanent virtual collaboration platform that prioritizes culture, connectedness, and puts people first. For example, you can send the sound of an air horn for a job well done.
Tangle gives you an infinite canvas of rooms with privacy “doors” where you can overhear conversations with spatial audio, like in a coffee shop, giving you casual swivel chair moments that aid collaboration, or close your office door to have private conversations.
With Tangle, employees have more freedom of choice about how they show up at work with highly customizable avatars, individual volume controls, and intuitive party responses like confetti.
Schwartz said many others have tried to create full 3D walking avatars to represent people, and the company doesn’t think that’s something people really want. It’s too complicated to navigate or move. It slows you down to get things done.
“We found that we only lost the camaraderie and social presence of feeling like you’re with a bunch of people versus a bunch of worker bees, like these are real people with real lives,” Schwartz said. “So a way to connect and feel like a close-knit team is the real thing missing in remote work software.”
The app runs at 60 frames per second because it comes from gamers. In fact, there are no delays that slow you down and make you less productive.
In Tangle you can raise your hand like you can in Microsoft Teams. But you can also increase the intensity and wave the hand back and forth when you need to make an important break. If someone makes a bad joke, you can send them to the prank dungeon and virtual prison bars will appear.
Tangle aims to reduce glut of meetings and increase camaraderie, creativity and the serendipitous spark of being together.
“Instead of taking personal culture and integrating it directly into remote life, we are taking the best of in-office and external and layered social functions that celebrate being human,” said Cy Wise, Absurd:joy COO, in a statement. “If a team’s culture consists solely of back-to-back meetings and endless messaging chats, culture and productivity suffer. Tangle has built-in features that allow employees to send and receive social signals and appear as themselves, making Tangle sustainable and exciting to the real human heart.”
Some users are Lightforge Games and FarHomes.
“As a wholly third-party company from day one, we knew our success depended on solving remote collaboration—specifically the social elements of randomly bumping into others, eavesdropping on chats, or even just hanging out,” says Matt Schembari , CEO of Lightforge Games. “Luckily we found Tangle super early and it completely defines how we work as a team. As our virtual hub, Tangle offers the benefits of remote working while maintaining the social connection and fun of a video game studio”
FarHomes CEO Chet Kittleson said Tangle makes collaboration fun again. He said Tangle creates the sense of belonging when working remotely, while eliminating the countless hours spent in meetings, whether it’s jumping into an open room to have a casual conversation, or knocking on the door of someone sitting with their head down.
The GamesBeat credo when talking about the game industry, is ‘where passion and business meet’. What does this mean? We want to tell you how important news is to you — not just as a decision maker in a game studio, but also as a game fan. Whether you’re reading our articles, listening to our podcasts, or watching our videos, GamesBeat helps you learn and have fun with the industry. Discover our briefings.
