Reunite

Inspiration

A lot of people (including us) have been stuck at home for a long time now, due to the well-known virus Covid 19. Because of this you might not have been able to keep up with the life of your friends and relatives. To be able to safely communicate with your friends, without having the risk to catch the virus, we have invented Reunite.

What it does

Reunite is a communication platform including an interactive chat and video service. You can create chat lobbies, join specific lobbies or join a completely random lobby, this way you can also meet new people and expand ur friendlist.

How we built it

For the frontend stack of the application we have used React.JS with a Socket.IO client that interacts with the backend of the application.

For the backend stack we have used an Express application for the github and discord authentication, for the database connection we have used Sequelize to make our lives easier with its easy to use ORM. For the main part of the API we have used Socket.IO so we can have fast and efficient traffic between the server and the clients. For authentication we have made use of Passport for Express.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we encountered was streaming the webcams to the other users in the lobby, since none of us had ever done this before. After trying a lot of libraries to efficiently stream this data, we ended up using Socket.IO and WebRTC using PeerJS.

What we have learned from this Hackathon

During this hackathon we have learned a lot more about the use of Websockets and WebRTC since the entire traffic between client and server is done through sockets.

What's next for Reunite

We are planning on adding more functionality into Reunite, and try to grow the platform to the point where people actually use it to communicate with their friends and family.