FOOO | Devpost

Inspiration

Due to recent events, companies are continuing to encourage or require remote work. One of the downsides to working remotely is the loss of connection you feel with all your co-workers. From being able to turn around & see that your co-worker has left for a quick break, to now having to guess whether or not they’re ignoring you on purpose on Slack, many people are finding remote work challenging as a result. Our project FOOO attempts to address this problem.

What it does

Our hack allows co-workers to communicate their statuses to one another without explicitly pinging their team. Unless you’re going to be AFK (away from keyboard) for an extended period of time, it’s not likely that you’re going to update your team about your whereabouts (i.e. going to the bathroom or grabbing a quick snack). This is especially true for new employees at companies, who are more reserved. We wanted to mimic an office setting where you’d normally be able to see what people are up to around the office.

How we built it

We used React Javascript to outline the components in our project, with Material-UI for styling. We used Konva, a 2d canvas library that allowed us to dynamically render the office spaces and avatars. Finally, of course, we made use of the Spotify Web API to add the Spotify information.

Challenges we ran into

One of us hasn't touched React in a while, so it was definitely difficult to pick up again. Additionally, using new technologies like Konva and the Spotify API, come with a learning curve. Especially Konva, which heavily uses HTML canvas elements, something we have never worked with before. Of course the time constraints of a hackathon was also a challenge for us.

What's next for FOOO

The most important aspect of this project we definitely want to address sometime is making this live to allow multiple people to utilize it at the same time! Some nice-to-haves are to allow for more customization and to have more extensions, like Slack for example for messaging!