Desk Mate

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Inspiration

During the Covid time, it is difficult to keep a good self-control for people who work at home which is a super comfortable place. For another, due to social isolation, people may feel lonely without peers around. That inspires us to create a virtual study room for work-from-home people to study together to improve their efficiency and interaction with peers.

It is hard for everyone to obtain the same experience working in quarantine time compared with the working/studying experience which they are used to before covid time. For instance , the following situation may occur: 1.feeling lonely and not motivated to do work without friends/classmates/colleagues around. 2.do not have friends/classmates/colleagues to discuss the working material while studying/working 3.cannot keep a good self-control at home or miss the quiet atmosphere in library where everyone else is working hard 4.find it difficult to make new friend in quarantine. Thus, we develop Desk Mates which aims to solves these problems by providing different virtual rooms with corresponding atmosphere (for instance comfy and relaxed or quiet) . Users can be benefited from the virtual working/studying experience which is similar to the life they used to live.

What it does

Desk Mate creates a virtual atmosphere of libraries, study rooms, workspaces and discussion corners for user to choose. The purpose of desk mate is to improve the user experience of working from home by forming a virtual atmosphere that the user used to and like to work in (for instance , quiet library with everyone around work hard , comfy discussion desk that friends can discuss while study). Result of experiments shows that atmosphere plays a vital role of productivity enhancement and we wish user can get benefit from the virtual atmosphere during quarantine and still live their life happily.

How we built it

We first use Figma to develop a prorotype for further UI design. After that, we use Axure for UI design. We used html to build a good User Interface and then use a JavaScript chat room to implement the study room.

Challenges we ran into

We find it hard to combine audio and video component into the current chat room. create a room by user requires close interaction with database and we ran out of time when developing it. So for now , the 'create a room' page is still under construction and need further development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We design the unique UI which includes good layout , nice hand-drawn logo, map and cute animal components. We not only create different virtual rooms but also shape atmosphere which user may get benefit from (for instance quiet , active and happy ).

What we learned

We leanred knowledge of html, css, javascropt, php, firebase, UI design. Moreover, we made a research and survey on issue caused by working from home.