Hi, thanks for the comment. Just to clarify—this is a demo of the virtual computer tech in 200 lines of code. It's not actually meant to be a functional product in and of itself.
With that said, the virtual computer technology has some big differences when compared to something like TeamViewer.
- First off, Hyperbeam allows many participants to connect to the same virtual computer at once. All audio/video is synchronized, and any participant can control it (although our API has granular control permissions).
- Hyperbeam requires no downloads
- We manage the infrastructure ourselves, meaning you can embed Hyperbeam virtual computers in your app and scale seamlessly
- You can embed Hyperbeam virtual computers in 3D software and VR
- You can programmatically control the web browser
Here are some companies that are currently using our tech:
Thanks! We began building the tech for a watch party site (watch.hyperbeam.com) and were similarly skeptical of other viable applications. However, it turns out there are a ton of really cool use cases—here are some companies using our API right now:
As for improving VR support, we're in the process of building a Unity SDK. Running computationally-expensive tasks in VR sounds really interesting in addition to the social use-case!
We’re building a “privacy mode” feature to address this exact problem that allows the host to black out the screen when entering sensitive information like credentials.
As for Hyperbeam getting access to credentials—we don’t store any input from users in the virtual computer. The only things we track are the time a particular IP is connected to the VM and the domains that are visited (this is anonymized).
Right now when you click the link we create a new "room" based on your IP. If you share the generated URL (like you did above) then people can join in and cobrowse with you
Seems like the link with the specific ID in my above comment has become the de-facto shared room now, at least as long as my comment stays at the top :)
Hmm, what I was thinking of was that everyone seemed to be competing with each other to click random UI elements on the virtual browser as rapidly as possible, I assume because there wasn't a way to speak with one another / coordinate. Or maybe I just missed the chat area?
Yeah we kept the MVP lean and didn't add chat or audio/video calling. Our goal (which we're not meeting) is to keep the Three.js example line count below 200.
When using the API you can set a specific height and width to resize the virtual computer. Additionally, we track touch events and you can drag-and-drop on devices like iPads.
It just shows a black screen where the browser should be on my phone but looks great in the browser.
If I wanted to run code that would say scroll through a site for everyone to watch, what is the best way to do it? From your docs looks like I should make a chrome extension and then have it install that?
With that said, the virtual computer technology has some big differences when compared to something like TeamViewer.
- First off, Hyperbeam allows many participants to connect to the same virtual computer at once. All audio/video is synchronized, and any participant can control it (although our API has granular control permissions).
- Hyperbeam requires no downloads
- We manage the infrastructure ourselves, meaning you can embed Hyperbeam virtual computers in your app and scale seamlessly
- You can embed Hyperbeam virtual computers in 3D software and VR
- You can programmatically control the web browser
Here are some companies that are currently using our tech:
Remote tutoring: https://www.teachwithkoala.com
VR offices & conferences: https://framevr.io
Watch parties: https://kosmi.io
Online coding lessons: https://www.strivemath.com