Space Bar

Inspiration

Sitting at home zooming with friends, family, and co-workers all day we realized that COVID-life had lost the randomness that allows you to go out, meet new people, and make new friends.

What it does

Space Bar is an online 'bar' where you can mingle with friends and strangers in your area to re-introduce the randomness of COVID-free life. Right now it doesn't have full functionality but we envision it being a place that is similar to a physical bar: you enter, you can scan the crowd of names of the people there at the moment and you can either choose to video chat with somebody randomly by clicking a 'random match' button, or if you find the name of a friend already there that you want to catch up with then you can tap them on the shoulder and video chat to them!

How we built it

• socket.io to connect frontend and backend
• Python backend, javascript frontend

Challenges we ran into

We had very ambitious ideas for this project, however a couple of us are very new to this type of coding so there was a lot of learning involved which slowed down our progress.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very happy with our idea! We are proud how much we learned over the course of developing this prototype of the product we envisioned. We are also proud of how our more experienced members were so generous and willing to teach and help our less experienced members.

What we learned

We learned a LOT! We learned how to use servers/sockets/clients to communicate between the frontend and backend of a website, as well as learning the fundamentals of new coding languages. We also learned how to break down a big idea into something that is more basic but works towards the end goal.

What's next for Space Bar

Space Bar has many 'nexts'! Here are a few:

• implement the video chat function so that bar-goers can see each other rather than just chat
• security: add a 'bouncer' (a person who greets each attendee before they enter) to screen who enters the bar
• get a DJ to play music over the site
• add a feature where you can be more specific with the type of person you'd like to randomly meet
• add food-delivery services like Foodora or Door Dash to mimic being able to buy bar food
• add online games people could play

Built With

• flask
• javascript
• json
• mongodb
• python
• react
• socket.io