9 ms·

Way ahead of its time: The Remote Lounge NYC (2013)

328 points by Ivoah 3y ago

cglong 3y ago
The most interesting thing to me is the timing: this opened just one month after 9/11, the event that ushered in a new era of state-sanctioned surveillance.
bar000n 3y ago
(2013)
paulgb 3y ago
Neat! In case anyone else is curious where it was, apparently it’s the present-day location of the Bowery Electric. https://www.theboweryelectric.com/ https://www.theboweryelectric.com/
- nhod 3y ago
  Trivia: it’s called Bowery Electric because for many many years before we moved in with Remote it was a hardware store called… Bowery Electric.
fallendev 3y ago
This place seemed so cool, it's a shame it's gone now, I would love to go to a bar like this.
- supportengineer 3y ago
  Around 2001 in San Francisco I stumbled into the ruins of a nightclub called the Caribbean Zone, and felt the same way when I saw the waterfall and the Doobie Brothers' airplane
stevenhubertron 3y ago
I have spent many nights there. I was good friends with the bartender and was there at least 1 night a week. Fun time. Have lotsa photos of it.
keepper 3y ago
Way to bring a memory back. I remember going to this place. Definitely wish there were more places like this now ( in nyc and elsewhere )
taterbase 3y ago
There's a really interesting movie called "We Live in Public" that documents one of the early tech pioneers Josh Harris as he sells his internet radio company and then creates an underground CCTV community. It's fascinating and equally frightening how people behaved towards one another while sharing space and constantly watching each other. It reminds me a lot the relationship many twitch streamers have with their viewers. You can find the movie for free on Tubi (in the states at least).
- nhod 3y ago
  The founders of Remote were in fact the technical team Josh Harris hired to create We Live in Public!
kilroy123 3y ago
Very cool. I wish I could have visited. I miss wacky theme bars like this. One of my favorite theme bars was a place in Mexico City called "Bang Bang" (closed down years ago). It was Stanley Kubrick themed. There were little black and white TVs everywhere playing weird stuff. Then in the back was a replica 2001: A Space Odyssey bedroom; from the end of the movie. With a glowing white floor. Many people would pile into the bed to smoke, drink, and make out.
- donretag 3y ago
  Not too far from the Remote Lounge was a Clockwork Orange themed bar named Korova Milk Bar around the same time.
  - nhod 3y ago
    So many memories flooding back. We once had a party at Razorfish and I somehow got in touch with random downtown people who made weird alcohols. One of them was a woman who made legit absinthe from real wormwood back before absinthe was legal again, and the other one was a woman who made some sort of narcotic “milk” alcohol inspired by A Clockwork Orange. I’d be shocked if it wasn’t the same woman as this bar!
  - vxNsr 3y ago
    Just for reference korova is russian for cow.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  There are still some. In Milwaukee, and now Chicago, there's a spy-themed bar called The Safehouse. The Milwaukee one has survived for decades, and they're still regarded as pretty cool.
  - cguess 3y ago
    Milwaukee is a weird town (disclosure: my home town, but left awhile ago). If it wasn't so close to Chicago, people would talk about it like Seattle or Portland. It's quirky with a world-class art museum, the largest music festival in the world every summer, a very reasonable cost of living, world-class universities, and amazing outdoor opportunities sitting directly on Lake Michigan and being a 30 minute drive from tons of massive state parks.
nimajneb 3y ago
This is fascinating, I would definitely frequent a bar with a theme like this. It's amazing.
confoundcofound 3y ago
Is there any way back (forward) to this sort of tech innocence?
- rozap 3y ago
  I think the general concept has continued to circulate on the internet. Chat roullete was popular for a long time, https://chat.meatspac.es/ https://chat.meatspac.es/ was a great niche for a while, omegle, etc, etc. But like Leo said in the video, these sorts of "experiments" are really sensitive to a critical mass, where they're super fun if you have > N people on the thing at the same time, and kinda weird if you have < N.
  - roughly 3y ago
    I think there’s a bell curve here - weird below N, cool above N but below X, and sufficiently full of unwanted penises above X to get weird again.
- chuan_l 3y ago
  I think two decades on and with " instagram " and other social media people have lost their innocence if you will call it that. Every image or camera shot is now curated , chosen from multiples and even post - processed at the moment of its inception. I used to wonder many years ago that if you could record all of your life in real time as a film from conception to the end. What that might be like to watch ? Self - image on social media is very much like that , an endless performance to a great invisible crowd ..
nhod 3y ago
I actually was the sole developer who wrote all the software that “networked” the custom hardware together. This project was so ahead of its time and yet required some rather arcane programming knowledge. So much fun though. AMA!
- nateguchi 3y ago
  Can you give some details on the hardware? What was the image capture device?
  - nhod 3y ago
    Yep! First, here’s a video from the guy who developed all the hardware, Leo Fernekes. (He runs a great YouTube channel called Leo’s Bag of Tricks all about electronics and neat stuff you can do. Leo’s a genius.) Lots of details in here. https://youtu.be/3i3db-QgHYE https://youtu.be/3i3db-QgHYE
    - 20after4 3y ago
      I love Leo's videos. Really top notch YouTube content.
  - nhod 3y ago
    The Cocktail Consoles (as we called them) were all custom hardware. Everything was designed to be rock-solid both physically (bars are full of drunk people and liquids) and operationally (everything had to Just Work). Leo designed a core “motherboard” which was a PIC microcontroller (I forget the exact model) that did five main things: serial I/O for the buttons and joystick; serial I/O for the attached TV tuner; serial I/O for the attached pan-tilt video camera; audio from the telephone handset; and then multiplexing all of that serial I/O and sending it over serial to a central server (which I wrote — in Perl!) which then controlled all the Cocktail Consoles in the bar. We used black and white cameras because they were both cheaper and also had much better sensitivity to low-light conditions (this has changed somewhat — but not entirely — in 20+ years) and black and white tube TVs because they were cheap. (This part was actually really dangerous — tube TVs hold enormous charges after they’ve been switched off, enough to kill someone, and we had the guts exposed on the insides of the Cocktail Consoles. Had to be very careful). We used public telephone handsets for the audio because of their durability, and video game buttons and joysticks so you could try very hard, and generally fail, to damage them. The TV's, cameras, and telephone audio were all connected over an analog CCTV system. The camera was video source and the handset's microphone was the audio source for a given channel. The TV could be tuned to any channel, and was thus the video output device, and the handset's speaker was tied to the same channel. Thus, if you tuned to any camera, you would see and hear whatever was going on at that console, but not the other way around, so it was rather voyeuristic. If TV A was tuned to camera B, and TV B was tuned to camera A, that established a bi-directional link, which meant you could see and converse with the other person. The serial data from all the microcontrollers were sent over serial-to-CAT5 converters, so the entire place was wired for Ethernet, but it was plain old serial over the wire. We then had these serial cards in a Dell server on the other end, which presented as roughly 100 serial ports on the server. This was where I had to do a lot of learning. I was a good IP programmer, but I had to reach back into the depths of the kernel and learn all about TTYs and switch() and lots of other stuff that even in 2000 was sort of forgotten. It took me forever to find any good documentation on how to handle that many serial ports in a non-blocking way. I kept asking Leo to just put a cheap Intel box in each machine and do it all over regular Ethernet, but he (rightly) kept insisting on this low-cost, rock-solid approach. Today the calculus would undoubtedly be different — you would do everything over IP — but back then Leo had a level of foresight I still admire.
foobarbecue 3y ago
There is a misplaced apostrophe in the title.
- foobarbecue 3y ago
  I'm curious -- why the downvotes? Does someone think I'm incorrect? The title here, to me, reads "Way ahead of it is time: The Remote Lounge NYC." I had to think about for a bit before I realized what was going on. I just thought someone might want to correct it. Edit: I see it's wrong in the original, so we just keep it, I suppose.
  - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
    Looks like the title of this post has been fixed. People downvote facts here, and persecute you for providing corrections that are helpful to everyone. It's infantile and depressing. They need to stop and think: How do people learn? Often from reading. Where do people do most of their reading now? Online. So when you attack people who correct incorrect writing online, you're attacking people who want to learn. Most foreign-language speakers, for example, WANT to be corrected so they know how to speak and write the language.
  - kelnos 3y ago
    I expect you were downvoted because your post isn't particularly interesting, and won't lead to thoughful discussion, let alone thoughtful discussion about the article in question. Sure, someone who doesn't know the difference between "its" and "it's" might learn something, but, while I'm not going to go so far as to say "that's not what HN is for", it's... well, kinda not what HN is for. Another -- unfair -- reason is that some posts about grammar and spelling come off has holier-than-thou nitpicking. I don't believe that describes your particular post, but it's hard to convey tone/purpose in text, and people get annoyed by stuff like that. I didn't downvote you (at 21 hours later, it doesn't matter at this point), but if your post was "in the way" of scrolling to more interesting conversations, I probably would have. I come to the comments on articles because I'm curious about what people are saying about the content of the article (and was thrilled in this case to find that a commenter here was actually the person who built the software that ran this bar). As much as I do believe that language and clarity is important, I don't particularly care if someone mistyped an apostrophe into the article's title. It's just noise to me.
naetius 3y ago
*its
bozhark 3y ago
This would be really neat today if there were different bars in different places all linked together like this. No ?, just a really neat concept
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- chuan_l 3y ago
  Love this post and reading about " remote lounge " ! I ran a night in a Chinatown dive bar here in Melbourne , Australia back in 1998 and inspired by the release of FSOL " ISDN " back then we streamed live performances from another club in Adelaide using 2 - bonded ADSL 128 Kbps links. It worked great despite just having enough bandwidth for decent audio and we ran 2 - small parties that were done like this .. Though my real vision at the time was to have all 4 - walls projection mapped with video from other locations and perhaps create an " in between " space. That could link with different places around the world. There was a project in the UK around 2005 that tried to do this using a circular ring with cameras. However , am surprised that nobody has attempted more with telepresence in public spaces ..
  - pmayrgundter 3y ago
    Super cool! What a great album and bitrate moment :)
robbywashere_ 3y ago
Probably got demolished and turned into a bank or a Verizon store.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  Probably not a bank. Banks are getting rid of physical service, not expanding it.
  - ttmb 3y ago
    They keep opening new branches around here. They are glorified ATM lobbies with minimal staff who will often direct you to use an ATM for anything that an ATM can do. But they do keep opening them. I sometimes wonder if it's just a complicated real estate investment play.
    - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
      Fair enough! You might be right.
sfuller808 3y ago
[dead]
MrMan 3y ago
[dead]
fortran77 3y ago
I know the source article had misspelled "its" and it's policy here to keep the original title, but can we change it to: Way ahead of [it's] time: The Remote Lounge NYC (docpop.org) or Way ahead of it's [sic] time: The Remote Lounge NYC (docpop.org) so it doesn't hurt readers' brains so much when they try to parse the sentence?
macNchz 3y ago
The video by one of the creators (at the very bottom of the page) is super interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i3db-QgHYE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i3db-QgHYE I was too young for this when it happened, but it reminds me a bit of when randomized video chat sites (Chatroulette and others?) first got popular in ~2009. I was a senior in college at the time, and we'd have big house parties during which we'd sit a webcam on top of a TV in the living room and just let it run, connecting to random strangers. Fun and interesting dynamic as people milled around the party and had brief interactions with people from around the world.
Dowwie 3y ago
I remember going there! There wasn't a single customer. I felt like something was very wrong and I needed to leave immediately.
rationalfaith 3y ago
[dead]
karlzt 3y ago
This submission comes from this comment from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36854960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36854960 People in 1920s Berlin nightclubs flirted via pneumatic tubes (2017): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36854061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36854061 (307 points, 1 day ago, 123 comments)
jb1991 3y ago
I celebrated my 35th birthday at this place!
buggythebug 3y ago
Lived by here in the early 2000's - went a couple of times. Was kind of cool! Don't remember when it shut down.
betamaxthetape 3y ago
An earlier (1968) venue with a similar concept was "The Birds Nest", a pub / nightclub in the UK. > They renamed The King’s Head, an almost brutalist post-war booze bunker at 2 King Street, installing a state-of-the-art steel dance-floor, light-show projectors and a high-end sound system. > They also installed an in-pub telephone network so that if you saw someone you liked the look of, you could dial their table and have a chat across the room. Source: https://boakandbailey.com/2020/10/watneys-birds-nest-pubs/ https://boakandbailey.com/2020/10/watneys-birds-nest-pubs/ [This information comes to me entirely second-hand, through articles and an episode of a podcast, so I can't vouch 100% for the accuracy.]
pauldix 3y ago
I went here in November 2001 right after it opened. It was my first time in NYC. I loved it, thought it was so cool. After that trip I decided I’d have to live in this city at some point. Moved here in 2005 and been in NYC ever since. Remote Lounge always reminds me of how magical and full of possibility the city felt (indeed still is!)
pmayrgundter 3y ago
Wow that place looks rad. Another early one was @Cafe! They broadcast using CU-SeeMe when it came out for testing from Cornell. Back in like 94? smth like 256x256 greyscale, 1-10fps if we were lucky, but a pretty reliable audio channel and text console for group chat. Anyone here from there? I was critt34 from CMU. A memory.. I met Seal on it once! He was at a party in LA and the host had CUSeeMe opened on the same reflector @cafe usually hung out on. I was DJ'ing Ministry on the channel from my dorm room at the time and then someone came to comment on the music.. and I suddenly recognized him.. OMG, you're Seal! He laughed and we talked a bit about Koyaanisqatsi and then he said he was helping on the soundtrack for Naqoyqatsi. Early web/internet days were so enchanting
paulorlando 3y ago
I had heard about this place, but sadly never visited. But after it shut down I was part of a startup that built a way for people to do this with audio only -- via phones and a web browser. We intentionally avoided video and images after studying the way strangers interacted across different formats. Remote Lounge looks fun, but for us it was more about long conversations where you didn't care about the other person's looks. I sometimes feel nostalgic for this type of thing.
creer 3y ago
Why no "tour" or replication? I understand that night entertainment is in part a novelty industry - but this took a lot of effort and was apparently hugely popular in NYC. Any insight as to why it didn't "tour"? or wasn't replicated? Did it, in fact, loose money overall and/or from the start? What's the deal with the (apparent) lack of replication of bar or nightclub themes? This is an open question - not specific to Remote Lounge or Meow Wolf or Audium (San Francisco "sound experience") or the several other creative ideas mentioned in the thread. To be fair, one format that was endlessly replicated is the game arcade - without bar initially and with bar now.

328 points by Ivoah 3y ago

The most interesting thing to me is the timing: this opened just one month after 9/11, the event that ushered in a new era of state-sanctioned surveillance.

bar000n 3y ago

(2013)

paulgb 3y ago

Neat! In case anyone else is curious where it was, apparently it’s the present-day location of the Bowery Electric. https://www.theboweryelectric.com/ https://www.theboweryelectric.com/

nhod 3y ago
Trivia: it’s called Bowery Electric because for many many years before we moved in with Remote it was a hardware store called… Bowery Electric.

fallendev 3y ago

This place seemed so cool, it's a shame it's gone now, I would love to go to a bar like this.

supportengineer 3y ago
Around 2001 in San Francisco I stumbled into the ruins of a nightclub called the Caribbean Zone, and felt the same way when I saw the waterfall and the Doobie Brothers' airplane

stevenhubertron 3y ago

I have spent many nights there. I was good friends with the bartender and was there at least 1 night a week. Fun time. Have lotsa photos of it.

keepper 3y ago

Way to bring a memory back. I remember going to this place. Definitely wish there were more places like this now ( in nyc and elsewhere )

taterbase 3y ago

There's a really interesting movie called "We Live in Public" that documents one of the early tech pioneers Josh Harris as he sells his internet radio company and then creates an underground CCTV community. It's fascinating and equally frightening how people behaved towards one another while sharing space and constantly watching each other. It reminds me a lot the relationship many twitch streamers have with their viewers. You can find the movie for free on Tubi (in the states at least).

nhod 3y ago
The founders of Remote were in fact the technical team Josh Harris hired to create We Live in Public!

kilroy123 3y ago

Very cool. I wish I could have visited. I miss wacky theme bars like this. One of my favorite theme bars was a place in Mexico City called "Bang Bang" (closed down years ago). It was Stanley Kubrick themed. There were little black and white TVs everywhere playing weird stuff. Then in the back was a replica 2001: A Space Odyssey bedroom; from the end of the movie. With a glowing white floor. Many people would pile into the bed to smoke, drink, and make out.

donretag 3y ago
Not too far from the Remote Lounge was a Clockwork Orange themed bar named Korova Milk Bar around the same time.
- nhod 3y ago
  So many memories flooding back. We once had a party at Razorfish and I somehow got in touch with random downtown people who made weird alcohols. One of them was a woman who made legit absinthe from real wormwood back before absinthe was legal again, and the other one was a woman who made some sort of narcotic “milk” alcohol inspired by A Clockwork Orange. I’d be shocked if it wasn’t the same woman as this bar!
- vxNsr 3y ago
  Just for reference korova is russian for cow.
ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
There are still some. In Milwaukee, and now Chicago, there's a spy-themed bar called The Safehouse. The Milwaukee one has survived for decades, and they're still regarded as pretty cool.
- cguess 3y ago
  Milwaukee is a weird town (disclosure: my home town, but left awhile ago). If it wasn't so close to Chicago, people would talk about it like Seattle or Portland. It's quirky with a world-class art museum, the largest music festival in the world every summer, a very reasonable cost of living, world-class universities, and amazing outdoor opportunities sitting directly on Lake Michigan and being a 30 minute drive from tons of massive state parks.

nimajneb 3y ago

This is fascinating, I would definitely frequent a bar with a theme like this. It's amazing.

confoundcofound 3y ago

Is there any way back (forward) to this sort of tech innocence?

rozap 3y ago
I think the general concept has continued to circulate on the internet. Chat roullete was popular for a long time, https://chat.meatspac.es/ https://chat.meatspac.es/ was a great niche for a while, omegle, etc, etc. But like Leo said in the video, these sorts of "experiments" are really sensitive to a critical mass, where they're super fun if you have > N people on the thing at the same time, and kinda weird if you have < N.
- roughly 3y ago
  I think there’s a bell curve here - weird below N, cool above N but below X, and sufficiently full of unwanted penises above X to get weird again.
chuan_l 3y ago
I think two decades on and with " instagram " and other social media people have lost their innocence if you will call it that. Every image or camera shot is now curated , chosen from multiples and even post - processed at the moment of its inception. I used to wonder many years ago that if you could record all of your life in real time as a film from conception to the end. What that might be like to watch ? Self - image on social media is very much like that , an endless performance to a great invisible crowd ..

nhod 3y ago

I actually was the sole developer who wrote all the software that “networked” the custom hardware together. This project was so ahead of its time and yet required some rather arcane programming knowledge. So much fun though. AMA!

nateguchi 3y ago
Can you give some details on the hardware? What was the image capture device?
- nhod 3y ago
  Yep! First, here’s a video from the guy who developed all the hardware, Leo Fernekes. (He runs a great YouTube channel called Leo’s Bag of Tricks all about electronics and neat stuff you can do. Leo’s a genius.) Lots of details in here. https://youtu.be/3i3db-QgHYE https://youtu.be/3i3db-QgHYE
  - 20after4 3y ago
    I love Leo's videos. Really top notch YouTube content.
- nhod 3y ago
  The Cocktail Consoles (as we called them) were all custom hardware. Everything was designed to be rock-solid both physically (bars are full of drunk people and liquids) and operationally (everything had to Just Work). Leo designed a core “motherboard” which was a PIC microcontroller (I forget the exact model) that did five main things: serial I/O for the buttons and joystick; serial I/O for the attached TV tuner; serial I/O for the attached pan-tilt video camera; audio from the telephone handset; and then multiplexing all of that serial I/O and sending it over serial to a central server (which I wrote — in Perl!) which then controlled all the Cocktail Consoles in the bar. We used black and white cameras because they were both cheaper and also had much better sensitivity to low-light conditions (this has changed somewhat — but not entirely — in 20+ years) and black and white tube TVs because they were cheap. (This part was actually really dangerous — tube TVs hold enormous charges after they’ve been switched off, enough to kill someone, and we had the guts exposed on the insides of the Cocktail Consoles. Had to be very careful). We used public telephone handsets for the audio because of their durability, and video game buttons and joysticks so you could try very hard, and generally fail, to damage them. The TV's, cameras, and telephone audio were all connected over an analog CCTV system. The camera was video source and the handset's microphone was the audio source for a given channel. The TV could be tuned to any channel, and was thus the video output device, and the handset's speaker was tied to the same channel. Thus, if you tuned to any camera, you would see and hear whatever was going on at that console, but not the other way around, so it was rather voyeuristic. If TV A was tuned to camera B, and TV B was tuned to camera A, that established a bi-directional link, which meant you could see and converse with the other person. The serial data from all the microcontrollers were sent over serial-to-CAT5 converters, so the entire place was wired for Ethernet, but it was plain old serial over the wire. We then had these serial cards in a Dell server on the other end, which presented as roughly 100 serial ports on the server. This was where I had to do a lot of learning. I was a good IP programmer, but I had to reach back into the depths of the kernel and learn all about TTYs and switch() and lots of other stuff that even in 2000 was sort of forgotten. It took me forever to find any good documentation on how to handle that many serial ports in a non-blocking way. I kept asking Leo to just put a cheap Intel box in each machine and do it all over regular Ethernet, but he (rightly) kept insisting on this low-cost, rock-solid approach. Today the calculus would undoubtedly be different — you would do everything over IP — but back then Leo had a level of foresight I still admire.

foobarbecue 3y ago

There is a misplaced apostrophe in the title.

foobarbecue 3y ago
I'm curious -- why the downvotes? Does someone think I'm incorrect? The title here, to me, reads "Way ahead of it is time: The Remote Lounge NYC." I had to think about for a bit before I realized what was going on. I just thought someone might want to correct it. Edit: I see it's wrong in the original, so we just keep it, I suppose.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  Looks like the title of this post has been fixed. People downvote facts here, and persecute you for providing corrections that are helpful to everyone. It's infantile and depressing. They need to stop and think: How do people learn? Often from reading. Where do people do most of their reading now? Online. So when you attack people who correct incorrect writing online, you're attacking people who want to learn. Most foreign-language speakers, for example, WANT to be corrected so they know how to speak and write the language.
- kelnos 3y ago
  I expect you were downvoted because your post isn't particularly interesting, and won't lead to thoughful discussion, let alone thoughtful discussion about the article in question. Sure, someone who doesn't know the difference between "its" and "it's" might learn something, but, while I'm not going to go so far as to say "that's not what HN is for", it's... well, kinda not what HN is for. Another -- unfair -- reason is that some posts about grammar and spelling come off has holier-than-thou nitpicking. I don't believe that describes your particular post, but it's hard to convey tone/purpose in text, and people get annoyed by stuff like that. I didn't downvote you (at 21 hours later, it doesn't matter at this point), but if your post was "in the way" of scrolling to more interesting conversations, I probably would have. I come to the comments on articles because I'm curious about what people are saying about the content of the article (and was thrilled in this case to find that a commenter here was actually the person who built the software that ran this bar). As much as I do believe that language and clarity is important, I don't particularly care if someone mistyped an apostrophe into the article's title. It's just noise to me.

naetius 3y ago

*its

bozhark 3y ago

This would be really neat today if there were different bars in different places all linked together like this. No ?, just a really neat concept

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
chuan_l 3y ago
Love this post and reading about " remote lounge " ! I ran a night in a Chinatown dive bar here in Melbourne , Australia back in 1998 and inspired by the release of FSOL " ISDN " back then we streamed live performances from another club in Adelaide using 2 - bonded ADSL 128 Kbps links. It worked great despite just having enough bandwidth for decent audio and we ran 2 - small parties that were done like this .. Though my real vision at the time was to have all 4 - walls projection mapped with video from other locations and perhaps create an " in between " space. That could link with different places around the world. There was a project in the UK around 2005 that tried to do this using a circular ring with cameras. However , am surprised that nobody has attempted more with telepresence in public spaces ..
- pmayrgundter 3y ago
  Super cool! What a great album and bitrate moment :)

robbywashere_ 3y ago

Probably got demolished and turned into a bank or a Verizon store.

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
Probably not a bank. Banks are getting rid of physical service, not expanding it.
- ttmb 3y ago
  They keep opening new branches around here. They are glorified ATM lobbies with minimal staff who will often direct you to use an ATM for anything that an ATM can do. But they do keep opening them. I sometimes wonder if it's just a complicated real estate investment play.
  - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
    Fair enough! You might be right.

sfuller808 3y ago

[dead]

MrMan 3y ago

[dead]

fortran77 3y ago

I know the source article had misspelled "its" and it's policy here to keep the original title, but can we change it to: Way ahead of [it's] time: The Remote Lounge NYC (docpop.org) or Way ahead of it's [sic] time: The Remote Lounge NYC (docpop.org) so it doesn't hurt readers' brains so much when they try to parse the sentence?

macNchz 3y ago

The video by one of the creators (at the very bottom of the page) is super interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i3db-QgHYE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i3db-QgHYE I was too young for this when it happened, but it reminds me a bit of when randomized video chat sites (Chatroulette and others?) first got popular in ~2009. I was a senior in college at the time, and we'd have big house parties during which we'd sit a webcam on top of a TV in the living room and just let it run, connecting to random strangers. Fun and interesting dynamic as people milled around the party and had brief interactions with people from around the world.

Dowwie 3y ago

I remember going there! There wasn't a single customer. I felt like something was very wrong and I needed to leave immediately.

rationalfaith 3y ago

[dead]

karlzt 3y ago

This submission comes from this comment from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36854960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36854960 People in 1920s Berlin nightclubs flirted via pneumatic tubes (2017): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36854061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36854061 (307 points, 1 day ago, 123 comments)

jb1991 3y ago

I celebrated my 35th birthday at this place!

buggythebug 3y ago

Lived by here in the early 2000's - went a couple of times. Was kind of cool! Don't remember when it shut down.

betamaxthetape 3y ago

An earlier (1968) venue with a similar concept was "The Birds Nest", a pub / nightclub in the UK. > They renamed The King’s Head, an almost brutalist post-war booze bunker at 2 King Street, installing a state-of-the-art steel dance-floor, light-show projectors and a high-end sound system. > They also installed an in-pub telephone network so that if you saw someone you liked the look of, you could dial their table and have a chat across the room. Source: https://boakandbailey.com/2020/10/watneys-birds-nest-pubs/ https://boakandbailey.com/2020/10/watneys-birds-nest-pubs/ [This information comes to me entirely second-hand, through articles and an episode of a podcast, so I can't vouch 100% for the accuracy.]

pauldix 3y ago

I went here in November 2001 right after it opened. It was my first time in NYC. I loved it, thought it was so cool. After that trip I decided I’d have to live in this city at some point. Moved here in 2005 and been in NYC ever since. Remote Lounge always reminds me of how magical and full of possibility the city felt (indeed still is!)

pmayrgundter 3y ago

Wow that place looks rad. Another early one was @Cafe! They broadcast using CU-SeeMe when it came out for testing from Cornell. Back in like 94? smth like 256x256 greyscale, 1-10fps if we were lucky, but a pretty reliable audio channel and text console for group chat. Anyone here from there? I was critt34 from CMU. A memory.. I met Seal on it once! He was at a party in LA and the host had CUSeeMe opened on the same reflector @cafe usually hung out on. I was DJ'ing Ministry on the channel from my dorm room at the time and then someone came to comment on the music.. and I suddenly recognized him.. OMG, you're Seal! He laughed and we talked a bit about Koyaanisqatsi and then he said he was helping on the soundtrack for Naqoyqatsi. Early web/internet days were so enchanting

paulorlando 3y ago

I had heard about this place, but sadly never visited. But after it shut down I was part of a startup that built a way for people to do this with audio only -- via phones and a web browser. We intentionally avoided video and images after studying the way strangers interacted across different formats. Remote Lounge looks fun, but for us it was more about long conversations where you didn't care about the other person's looks. I sometimes feel nostalgic for this type of thing.

creer 3y ago

Why no "tour" or replication? I understand that night entertainment is in part a novelty industry - but this took a lot of effort and was apparently hugely popular in NYC. Any insight as to why it didn't "tour"? or wasn't replicated? Did it, in fact, loose money overall and/or from the start? What's the deal with the (apparent) lack of replication of bar or nightclub themes? This is an open question - not specific to Remote Lounge or Meow Wolf or Audium (San Francisco "sound experience") or the several other creative ideas mentioned in the thread. To be fair, one format that was endlessly replicated is the game arcade - without bar initially and with bar now.