BubbleCoffee

Mindmap of features, USP
Concept & overview
Screenshot

Inspiration

Coffee breaks are an important part of the employee experience. It's where people get to know each other, talk about work, life or other things. In these times, this social gathering is much harder - Coffee breaks are now mostly digital, through Zoom or Teams. The experience there however isn't great - There can only be one conversation and many people don't want to speak up in front of everybody.

What it does

CoffeeBubble re-creates the physical break room experience in the digital world. Instead of one large conference call, people join a room, where they can move around. Depending on their location/proximity to others, they hear conversations louder or more silent. This way, multiple conversations can happen at the same time.

How We built it

We developed a React app that runs together with a NodeJS backend. Our responsive design guarantees compatibility on all possible devices. WebRTC is used for the communication between the peers. To orchestrate the server we use Azure.

Challenges We ran into

We had problems to move the video streams back and forth between the different tables. We imagined this task to be easier.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We think that with our idea we can definitely add value to the social interaction within a company. Through casual entertainment, various innovative ideas for companies can be created that would not arise in any other context. Through our application, this social interaction is also possible with physical distance.

What We learned

We have learned that the creation of an application within a hackathon definitely works better on site. But we hope that our idea will give us a further added value.

What's next for BubbleCoffee

First and foremost, the app should be finalized. The WebRTC connections are not yet stable and the user interface still needs some work. We definitely want to improve the user experience, which is a key factor of our application. Depending on user feedback, we would further add analytics functions to help people connect even better or add chat functionalities.