Inspiration
The inspiration for this project arose from the silent awkwardness of the first five minutes of online university lectures. The period of time that would normally be occupied by laughter and conversation is non-existent in many online lectures and we sought a way to remedy that.
What it does
VStudent is much like Zoom, Google Meets, or BBCollaborate, but with a twist. Users can choose who to "focus" on in the virtual meeting. By focusing in on a single person or many people, the user can hear them more clearly. By contrast, for those that you choose not to focus on, you'd barely be able to hear them; it's as if they were background noise on the other side of the lecture hall. This way, during the beginning of each online class, you can have a chat with your friends without being the star of the show in a class of 200+ students.
How we built it
We first created an express.js API using node.js which would generate the classroom session and each user's (client) unique access token, both of which we pass back upon a client request. We then created a React.js client which linked up with the services provided by the Vonage Video API (formerly known as Opentok) to facilitate the virtual lecture.
Challenges we ran into
Originally, we wanted to do something far more ambitious which was to create a virtual avatar that you could choose to display instead of your face. Unfortunately, we could not get this to work so we turned our attention elsewhere.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We successfully created a virtual meeting website and implemented our main feature.
What we learned
Working with Vonage API was at times frustrating, but also enjoyable and instructive. Much of the learning came from reading documentation and community examples/guides which is a very valuable skill to retain moving ahead.
What's next for VStudent
Now that we've built our distinguishing features, the next steps are to polish up the UI and implement the classic features of a virtual meeting.
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