Spacebar is a 3d world I built with my friends Sam Gorman and Kanyes Thaker over the course of 2+ years, which helps people build together online in a natural way.
While working on Spacebar, we used to have weekly syncs where we discussed which direction to go in next, and since we lived in different cities, we'd use Spacebar to host those meetings. I always thought it was super cool that we used Spacebar to build Spacebar.
We designed and built the 3D spacebar model completely from scratch in Blender, then optimized the crap out of it to get it to perform real-time in browser on older hardware. We wrote a custom WebRTC networking stack, then shifted over to LiveKit to scale better.
AI got so good throughout our time building Spacebar that we went from a god awful skybox generated with DALL-E to a beautiful one generated with Blockade Labs, which made our overall product so much better essentially for free just through the power of Moore's Law.
We never intended to work on this with such a strong consumer focus -- it was actually started purely as a means to challenge ourselves as engineers and learn across new domains. But I guess we couldn't help but care deeply about the product design and messaging, even though we ultimately decide to stop working on it right as we geared up for a launch, to create time to pursue goals we thought were ultimately more important.