Inspiration
The inspiration for Parkspace came to us when we were looking for a reliable yet simple video chat app, and to our surprise, there was no such app. For example, platforms like Zoom or Skype required an account, Discord or Google Meet required tedious amounts of setup and facetime required you to own an apple device. All these problems could have all been avoided with a simple meeting program. We wanted to take into consideration the people who are not as good with technology, and little children who may need to be in a meeting for online classes. This meant that our UI had to be the simplest it can be. Just like a walk in the park, we want Parkspace to be able to connect people the same way a walk in the park does.
What it does
Parkspace is a web video chat application that was designed to be very minimalistic and easy to use. Parkspace allows you to create a meeting with a meeting code, which can then be used to join a meeting. There’s no signups, no downloads, none of the complications. All you need is a web browser on your desktop or mobile phone and the code, that’s it. For example, gone are the days of your teacher sending you meeting codes everyday for class. With this system, students and educators can easily use Parkspace to connect to one other.
How we built it
Parkspace uses React as the frontend framework and Node.js and the backend. For the splash screen, we also used pure html/css and vanilla JS. React takes care of the GUI for the main screen, which displays your own camera and your peer’s cameras. The backend in this case becomes a signal server that controls the peer-to-peer mesh network using WebRTC and socket.io, allowing the user to see a clear picture of the other people who are connected. We used Heroku to host the server and Netlify to host the frontend.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into a lot of issues that are mostly surrounding the React framework. Since this is our first time working seriously with react, we had to fix a lot of problems where we went “wait what”. Now that we have the experience however, I feel a lot more comfortable with React. Same thing can be said about Node.js.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Again, this is our first time working seriously with react and node, so we really weren’t expecting much result, but somehow we managed to get everything to function from the frontend to the backend.
What we learned
We learned a lot about the many libraries and frameworks that we used for this project, which will definitely help with projects in the future.
What's next for Parkspace
We are very proud of Parkspace, and after Wafflehacks, we hope to expand this idea further until we end up with a polished product that can potentially help millions across the world. Although we had very limited time to complete this project, we mostly wanted to expand this idea to the field of education.
- Improved code system
- Even simpler UI
- Whiteboard system for teachers
- Screenshare system for teachers
- Attendance track system for teachers
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