Timer Talk

Main Screen
Joining Call Solo

Inspiration

Timer Talk was inspired by the desire to bring people who are geographically close together online. Modern online communication software has done an excellent job of bringing internet uses from across the world together in deep online friendships, but our goal with Timer Talk was to bring people who were geographically close together to potentially turn an online friendship into a more meaningful in-person one.

What it does

Timer Talk connects users based on their location. For example a user joining from Toronto, would be connected to other users in Toronto. They start with texting, until a timer runs out, and they must switch to audio. Another timer runs, and by the end of it, they transition to a video call.

How we built it

We built Timer Talk using Python, Pygame for the interface, sockets for messaging, and OpenCV for video streaming.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into issues building the server to run our chatrooms due to a lack of experience developing the software to facilitate such a server. While this lead to a few headaches here and there, we found the learning experience truly rewarding. We also had issues in video calls across operating systems. Unfortunately we weren't able to solve those issues but hope to do so if we plan a proper release of the application.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of trying something out of our comfort zones, even if it didn't work as seamlessly as we initially expected. The work that went into creating the UI from PyGame involved well-thought out programming design choices. The video and audio call functionality felt almost like breakthroughs when we got them working seamlessly together. There were some issues on the server side, but considering the lack of experience with servers, we were able to develop a reasonably well-designed server infrastructure that we hope to greatly improve upon if/when we plan to release the app.

What we learned

The project taught us the intricacies communication across computers and UI design. We have considerable amount left to learn, but are glad this project laid the foundations.

What's next for Timer Talk

Future plans include a greatly improved server architecture that's well integrated with the text, audio, and video chat functionalities to create a more seamless, enjoyable experience for our users.