Bubblz.Space

A new way to video call, that allows for more natural conversations, and more engaging learning oppurtunities

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Quick note about video and how to use bubblz.space :)

Our video is a bit choppy due to technical issues and we couldn't fix it due to the time crunch. If you want to try out our program, go to the url. When you first visit it, it will generate a secure link that you can use to share with others (or open another tab with to test). To drag the yourself to another room, drag by the top of your video. Thanks for checking out our demo!

Inspiration

Existing video call platforms have serious limitations. Most platforms only really let one person talk at a time, making it difficult to have natural conversations, where there may be many conversations going on in the same room at once. Furthermore, existing platforms are restrictive for remote learning, making it hard for professors and students to interact with each other in the same way they would in in-person classes.

What it does

Bubbles is a new way of doing video calls. The advantage bubblz.space has over other video sharing software is the concept of “the bubble.” Bubbles are like public breakout rooms. When you go into a bubble you can only hear people who are talking in your bubble. Going in and out of bubbles is as easy as dragging your video feed to whichever bubble you want! This is nice because a professor or TA can see everyone in the class, even when in breakout rooms to more easily gauge how well the class is doing on the discussion or assignment.

How We built it

We used node.js, and webrtc (with the help of socket.io and peer.js) to build our application, and hosted our solution on Google Cloud. We registered the domain https://bubblz.space/. Feel free to check it out to see the live version!

Challenges We ran into

The project uses peer-to-peer connection to send the video and audio streams. While this makes our platform secure, it also made it more complicated! We had to handle distributed systems and race conditions to get a working solution.

What's next for Bubblz.Space

Some of our ideas for expanding the platform include adding optional machine learning to analyze the emotions from the voice and video in each bubble and display the average emotions of each bubble to the professor or TA who is teaching a class to more easily see if people need help. Another feature tailored to teaching

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Updates

posted an update —

We had a lot of technical difficulties with the video not recording sound, cutting off early, being extremely laggy, etc. Trying to fix those meant we didn't have time to edit it down to under 3 minutes. I hope you check out the link to the project in the Try it out section to see what it's really like. Once the host joins the bubblz.space link, they'll be able to copy the URL which contains the meeting ID for others to join.

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