The Reading Room

The Reading Room home page
Library of available stories

Inspiration

The Reading Room was created during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic as a way to foster a sense of community. The spirit of the app is to provide a social connection for people of all ages, but especially older adults who may be more likely to live alone and become isolated when spending long stretches of time at home or those in nursing homes who have lost visitation rights. It also allows

What it does

Children, or anyone else interested in attending a reading, may share a private virtual room with the reader. Rooms can be simply scheduled by filling out a form, and are available immediately, and a selection of over fifty fairy tales are provided to read from. By providing an email, participants can choose to host their reading later, and join by clicking on the links sent to their email address. In the rooms, both a visual and audio stream are provided, as well as the text for the selected book. Both parties are able to read through the story text together and socialize while remaining healthy and safe in their own homes.

Challenges we ran into

We initially had trouble setting up the P2P video connection, but were able to overcome this by using PeerJS.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The first time we were able to video chat each other felt like such a major milestone!

What we learned

We learned about peer-to-peer streaming and how to use data stored in a database to provide the information necessary to initiate streaming between two specific peers in a private 'room'.