## Metadata - Author: [[Maggie Appleton]] - Full Title: Ambient Co-Presence - Category: #articles - Summary: Creating a sense of shared, synchronous space among multiple people on the web is challenging. The current web experience lacks the qualities of shared physical space, such as directionality and subtle awareness of others. While multiplayer cursors and annotations add some sense of shared activity, they lack an ambient quality. Spatial audio, like that used in Gather.town, shows promise for ambiently sensing many people in a space. The challenge is finding a balance between drawing attention to others and providing ambient companionship in digital spaces. - URL: https://maggieappleton.com/ambient-copresence ## Highlights - Most of the web is still designed to accomodate slow-loading, single-player experiences. We all stare into linear, individualised feeds that lack the qualities of shared physical space; directionality, subtle awareness of those around us, opportunities for ad-hoc interactions, freedom to explore, and most critically, a shared understanding we are seeing the same reality as people in our immediate vicinity. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnta7n4cj1t7whas4tn9mdrs))