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Oct 18, 2026 · product · in progress

SideRoom

A browser-based 3D office with spatial voice, built for online team-building. A team walks a shared space, hears each other by distance and direction, and plays facilitated games between conversations, with no install and no accounts.

role Everything — product, networking, 3D world, spatial audio, and game design

Live
  • Next.js
  • TypeScript
  • Three.js
  • React Three Fiber
  • Rapier
  • LiveKit
  • Web Audio API
  • Zustand
  • Docker

Case study

Contents
  1. 00Top
  2. 01Highlights
  3. 02Spatial Audio as the Product
  4. 03Games, Without A Scoreboard Of Damage
  5. 04Built For A Real Session
  6. 05Where It Stands

Online team events tend to be a video call with a quiz bolted on. SideRoom starts from the opposite end: a place. A team walks into a small 3D office in the browser, hears whoever is near, drifts away to leave a conversation, and gathers when the room keeper starts a game. It's a prototype for a team-building product, organized company sessions first, with a self-serve version only once the sessions prove reliable.

Highlights

  • A 64 × 40 metre office in seven zones (all-hands, open-plan desks, entrance, a ten-seat meeting room, an activity space, a break area and two huddle booths), described declaratively and checked by a test that walks the plan on a half-metre grid to prove every zone is reachable.
  • HRTF spatial voice: full volume nearby, directional as you move, silent beyond 13.5 metres. Standing on the podium makes you audible everywhere; standing on a huddle rug keeps the conversation on it.
  • Facilitated games run by the room keeper: musical chairs with a count-in and procedural music, and dodgeball on a court that furnishes itself when the game starts and is cleared when it ends.
  • The everyday parts of a meeting, made physical: a hand-raise queue everyone sees in the same order, screen sharing onto the meeting-room screen, emotes, sittable chairs, and throwable office props that bounce and stay where they land.
  • A lobby with a live microphone check and actionable device errors, noise removal and voice-focus modes with explicit fallback, per-person volume and mute, and visible reconnect states.
  • One password-protected room-keeper console, guest entry by room ID and password or invitation link, a solo demo office with synthetic colleagues, and no recording.

Spatial Audio as the Product

Every remote voice runs through a Web Audio graph that pans it by position relative to your camera and attenuates it with distance until it's gone. That one rule does the social work that mute buttons and breakout rooms do elsewhere: side conversations happen by walking away, not by opening a menu. The podium overrides the spatial route so its speaker reaches the whole room, and doorways are taken into account, so the meeting room sounds enclosed.

Games, Without A Scoreboard Of Damage

Play is the reason people come back, so it's designed to be safe by default. Clicking strikes, right-clicking throws, and a knockdown recovers on its own, with no health and no scoring. The room keeper can switch the room to a serious mode that pauses punches and rocks while keeping emotes. When an activity ends, a recap reads it back as deadpan meeting minutes, ready to paste into the team chat.

Built For A Real Session

Real-time voice fails socially before it fails technically. The lobby catches microphone problems before anyone enters, interruptions show as reconnecting and recovered instead of silence, and every participant controls their own mix. Physics and positions stay in Rapier bodies, while pose updates go out at up to 12 Hz when moving and as slower reliable keyframes when idle.

Where It Stands

SideRoom runs live at sideroom.lesfer.ma. It's a prototype heading for small company pilots; pricing, supported team sizes and the reliability bar a pilot has to meet are still open questions, and the roadmap treats its ideas beyond the current room as proposals, not commitments.