My co-founder Rene and I are huge fans of remote work, but having lived it from both the developer and the manager sides, are also aware of its pitfalls, like burnout, loneliness, and massively increased coordination overhead to get anything done. We believe this is due to limitations of the currently available tools, rather than an inherent problem with remote work itself.

We founded Jamscape in late 2022 as a bet that RTO mandates would fail, because knowledge workers would want to hold on to all the freedom and flexibility provided by remote work. Apart from the global funding meltdown the timing was just right; we had a highly tuned cross-platform edge-AI tech stack, inherited from my previous startup Vertigo.ai (HN post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31516108 with all the details), the new wave of Macs and AI PCs were coming out, and laptop cameras were finally starting to catch up with smart phones in terms of resolution and quality. On top of that, generative AI arrived and allowed us to add automated transcripts and summaries of conversations, bridging the worlds of text, voice & video.

Jamscape is similar in spirit to other “virtual office” tools, but the focus is on 1) accurate detection of presence, which we achieve using live face recognition, 2) privacy and non-intrusiveness during video calls, which we achieve with tight face-cropping, and 3) high fidelity face-to-face interactions with real eye-contact, using our proprietary neural video codec.

Jamscape allows you to create Rooms where you are able to see the faces of everyone else, either live, or as static AI-cropped portrait images. We have tried hard to balance accessibility and privacy, so the system is strictly tit-for-tat, only allowing you to see others only if you let them see you. Naturally it is easy to initiate a quick conversation, and because the presence detection done with AI is always accurate, you don’t risk calling into the void or disturbing people when it’s not convenient. Thus, this is also where existing virtual office tools fall short as the virtual and the real world are not in-sync. There is a do-not-disturb mode when you just want to focus, and a “ping” mechanism to indicate wanting to communicate whenever it is convenient.

You can also turn your conversations into Jams, threaded mixtures of chat and AI-generated summaries of video conversations that you can edit and share, to keep everyone on the same page without having everyone sit through every conversation. The latest feature we have added is the ability to run RAG searches across all your Jams, literally putting all your team’s combined knowledge at your fingertips! (sorry, just too tempting.)

We are still building, and at this point we are looking for pilot users and feedback. We have been trying to hit the right balance between privacy and sharing, focus-time and collaboration, and we are always looking for constructive feedback and discussion about what the right remote working tool looks like.

The macOS and Windows 11 releases can be downloaded from https://jamscape.com. The latter is still a little rough, but if you have a somewhat recent Windows 11 PC it should run fine on your system. Linux is on the roadmap too, as are mobile and web-native versions. We are using a lot of cutting edge technologies, so if you’re on Windows please make sure you have the latest graphics drivers installed. Also, having a GPU from Intel and NVIDIA instead of AMD will result in a slightly better experience due to a crash bug in AMD’s drivers that we currently have to work around (if you're from AMD feel free to get in touch.)

Thanks! Rene & Jacob Jamscape