Close Door

A decentralised platform for video conferencing and instant messaging.

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Inspiration

Due to COVID, work-from-home has had a very positive adoption rate and with that in mind, video conferencing is the way to go to have the face-to-face meeting experience without actually having to be in the same location.

However, in the past few months, video conferencing platforms such as Zoom have seen massive data breaches and this has been a very concerning for the government and many businesses. In this day and age, privacy and safety of their data is of paramount importance to any user and we at Close Door aim to give our users just that.

What it does

Close Door is a Peer to Peer communications platform which allows a user to anonymously connect with anyone by simply sharing a link to the meeting room. The platform can support group calls of 50 people per room at once and all of this is possible without the use of any servers.

How we built it

Close Door has a simple frontend app which is PWA compatible and does nothing but display visual components.

In its core, Close Door uses WebRTC to directly connect between participants. We have our own signalling server that is used to connect peers in one room, basically by establishing a WebRTC connection.

Along with this, we use STUN and TURN servers. A STUN server is required to get peer to peer connections through firewalls and a TURN server is used if the STUN does not succeed.

Challenges we ran into

Optimising the frontend for large rooms whilst making sure that each video frame is equally sided an appropriately positioned. The frontend was actually the most time-consuming part of the project as it not only had to be able to accomodate large number of users in one room but it also had to be responsive to various screen sizes.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

All complexities considered, we are quite proud of the fact that we managed to build and deploy a rather stable beta of the platform in a little over a month.

What we learned

We got a much stronger grasp at the concepts of WebRTC and networking. However, most important of all, we learnt how to build highly responsive user interfaces along with highly effective, efficient user experiences.

What's next for Close Door

Close Door currently supports:

  1. Video Conferencing (One on One or group calls of up to 50 people per room)
  2. Screen Sharing
  3. Changing your background using AI (We support either background blur, Upload your own background or get one from the internet)
  4. Group messaging
  5. Choose which camera or audio device to use (Back or front camera on mobile phones for example)

Going forward, we would like to commercialize it and add the following features:

  1. Support truly "Unlimited" number of participants
  2. AI driven minutes-of-the-meeting transcription/generation
  3. Record your meetings and store them either on CloseDoor’s cloud or a location of your choice
  4. Branded sub-domain for your meeting rooms (your-company.closedoor.me)
  5. Allow a business to add their logo within the meeting room
  6. Allow a business to theme the meeting rooms with their brand colours
  7. Launch native mobile and desktop apps (already in early alpha stages)

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