This past week, my colleague Aaron and I had the opportunity to attend the Reactathon Advanced Conference. The conference featured some great talks, many of which included React Native, GraphQL, and WebAssembly. In addition to the conference, Reactathon also hosted a hackathon, which TokBox supported by sponsoring. It was great seeing the community that loves this great framework come together and share their knowledge.
Making winning connections with React
At the hackathon itself, we saw a total of 19 projects, 17 of which used the OpenTok API. Many of the hackers loved the idea of connecting people all over the world by using video in a contextualized manner.
This sparked several e-learning solutions along with a few social applications all geared towards connecting individuals that shared a similar interest. Noobvolution, an eSports platform, aimed to connect gaming coaches and students who wanted to get 1:1 training over live video.
Noobvolution, an eSports platform, connected gaming coaches and students for 1:1 training over live video.
The team also incorporated features such as screen sharing, text chat, and annotations to help collaborate. They also planned on adding OpenTok archiving feature so students could revisit these recorded sessions in the future and have them as reference. It was a great end to the hackathon witnessing such a great product come in first place.
Learning with live video
Study Buddy, another e-learning solution, created an online platform for individuals interested in on-demand learning. Additionally, we saw Team Assemble use the Live Interactive Broadcast feature and create a product where meetup organizers could broadcast talks so people everywhere could attend regardless of physical location of the event. They also recorded these sessions so people could watch later as well.
With a host of applications built for learning or studying, it’s clear that innovation in the e-learning space has a long way to go, and React and OpenTok can play a part in that.
Combining Live Video with Facial Recognition
A group of students from San Diego created Mème Brûlée, a web application where individuals get connected to a video chat room and caption memes together. While the user is captioning a meme, their platform captures a screenshot of the user’s face using OpenTok and uses Microsoft’s Face Recognition API for sentiment analysis. The inspiration for this product was to create a fun game where they can map the reactions of the users looking at the memes to emojis.
Since this was a hackathon with a focus on React.js, a JavaScript library for building user interfaces, most of the hackers used OpenTok React, a web component for the OpenTok JS SDK.
If you’re interested in creating mobile applications, you can also use React Native with OpenTok. Check out my post about it here, then sign up for register for my OpenTok React Native webinar on April 11th where I’ll be walking you through creating a live video app for iOS and Android with React Native.
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