The experience of being in a crowd is visceral. We feel a sense of connection and belonging through shared experiences like watching a sporting event, speech, or performance. In online environments, though, we are often part of a crowd without feeling it. ROAR is designed to allow very large groups of distributed spectators have meaningful conversations with strangers or friends while creating a sense of presence of thousands of other spectators. ROAR is also interested in creating opportunities for collective action among spectators and providing flexible ways to share content among very large groups. These systems combine to let you feel the roar of the crowd even if you're alone in your bedroom.

At its heart, ROAR is about chat. You can send two different kinds of text-based messages. Like a normal chat system, you can send chat messages to other people in your section of the crowd. These messages rapidly expire, but you can send them as often as you like. Shouts, on the other hand, have a life of their own. When you shout something, everyone in your section sees it first and if enough of them like it (by clicking '+1') people in other sections will see it too.

Sections in ROAR are your way of deciding what kind of chat experience you want to have. Sections can be named anything you want—you can make your own section by just typing in any name you like. All sections are public, but only the most popular sections are shown in the suggested list, so you can make a section for just you and your friends if you like. Suggested sections all have a small activity indicator to help you gauge how active that section is; the more dots, the more chatting going on there.

Pulse is what really brings the crowd together in ROAR. The words you see bubbling up below are the most common recent terms across all sections. The more words there are, the more active the crowd is; when there are very few words, the crowd has gone silent. Well-coordinated crowds can manipulate this display by coordinating common outbursts (perhaps using the shout feature) to force the system to display their chosen words.