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# Why we did

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Ever since the creation of online video sharing, high bandwidth usages have always been a major issue. We wanted to develop a service that allowed for low data usage video sharing, because even now some areas in the world have limited bandwidth making it very difficult to do video calls. This would even have an effect on when we would try and call our families overseas. Video adds a layer of depth that in unattainable by voice calling only.

# How we did

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ASKEY was developed to be a solution to all of these issues. By converting the video to an Ascii string before transmission and then displaying the video through Ascii, we end up sending a significantly smaller amount of data. However, we managed to maintain a reasonable amount of video quality despite going through this process.

# What we did

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In the end, we built a functional web application that allows you to chat and facetime people with audio at ultra-low bandwidth requirement (Whooping ~250KB/s **RAW** uncompressed). As a comparison, a 480p **RAW** video requires 44 times the bandwidth at 11MB/s! Imagine what we could achieve in the future if we work on actual compression!

We hope using this new technology we can break the locks that divide the world, one asKEY at a time.

Our url is **very-low.tech** (Pun intended)
## Inspiration

The world is constantly chasing after smartphones with bigger screens and smaller bezels. But why wait for costly display technology, and why get rid of old phones that work just fine? We wanted to build an app to create the effect of the big screen using the power of multiple small screens.

## What it does

InfiniScreen quickly and seamlessly links multiple smartphones to play videos across all of their screens. Breathe life into old phones by turning them into a portable TV. Make an eye-popping art piece. Display a digital sign in a way that is impossible to ignore. Or gather some friends and strangers and laugh at memes together. Creative possibilities abound.

## How we built it

Forget Bluetooth, InfiniScreen seamlessly pairs nearby phones using ultrasonic communication! Once paired, devices communicate with a Heroku-powered server written in node.js, express.js, and socket.io for control and synchronization. After the device arrangement is specified and a YouTube video is chosen on the hosting phone, the server assigns each device a region of the video to play. Left/right sound channels are mapped based on each phone's location to provide true stereo sound support. Socket-emitted messages keep the devices in sync and provide play/pause functionality.

## Challenges we ran into

We spent a lot of time trying to implement all functionality using the Bluetooth-based Nearby Connections API for Android, but ended up finding that pairing was slow and unreliable. The ultrasonic+socket.io based architecture we ended up using created a much more seamless experience but required a large rewrite. We also encountered many implementation challenges while creating the custom grid arrangement feature, and trying to figure out certain nuances of Android (file permissions, UI threads) cost us precious hours of sleep.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

It works! It felt great to take on a rather ambitious project and complete it without sacrificing any major functionality. The effect is pretty cool, too—we originally thought the phones might fall out of sync too easily, but this didn't turn out to be the case. The larger combined screen area also emphasizes our stereo sound feature, creating a surprisingly captivating experience.

## What we learned

Bluetooth is a traitor. Mad respect for UI designers.

## What's next for InfiniScreen

Support for different device orientations, and improved support for unusual aspect ratios. Larger selection of video sources (Dailymotion, Vimeo, random MP4 urls, etc.). Seeking/skip controls instead of just play/pause.
## Inspiration

Our focus is to connect people around the globe by building a platform that hosts conferences in virtual reality. Imagine the convenience of meeting anyone, from anywhere, and at any time -- all from the comfort of your home or office. Large, popular, and influential events like Google I/O, Grace Hopper, etc. often get sold out before everyone who wants to can purchase a ticket. Our infinitely scalable platform eliminates this problem. We disrupt the constraints of the physical world (space, time), and open up the opportunity for you to connect with your stakeholders and audience in an enhanced reality. We see virtual reality as an elegant solution to not only language barriers, but also the inefficiencies, expenses, and discomforts of physically traveling to interact with others.

The potential of our project is as scalable as our platform. Virtual reality is not only a solution, it is the future. What’s most exciting is that our platform opens up a new marketplace for businesses around the world to connect, network, and make an impact.

## What it does

Full conference and live communication in virtual reality from anywhere in the world! In our prototype, we've created a lobby, a webinar room, and a conference room where participants can talk and engage in real time.

# Significant Problems Addressed:

Discriminatory barriers in terms of social, geographic, and financial conditions.
High costs with regard to travel time and conference cost
Limited participants

## What we learned

This was a very ambitious project for our team -- especially considering that none of us have worked with VR before. Each and every one of us had to overcome steep learning curves in order to work with multiple different technologies with which we were not familiar.

Main things we learned:
-Working with Unity
-Multiplayer communication and networking
-3D design for virtual reality

# Problems we ran into:

We ran into a lot of incompatibility problems, as our project involves several different pieces of technology. So we had to think outside the box in order to make our devices compatible.
-First, our Alienware laptops had an embedded graphic card that is incompatible with the current version of the Oculus runtime. With that, we had to hack our way to downgrade the current run time on our computer, edit some of the registry logs, and disable error reporting in order for the Oculus to be compatible.
-Finding an ultimate back-end platform for our multiplayer platform and enabling voice so that everyone inside our platform can talk to each other was also a challenge.
-When we tried to set up the speech to text, text to speech API, our backend platform did not accept sound so we had to convert our audio clip’s 0.5 second frame -> convert to float -> convert to byte -> send it to the rest of the players of the network -> converted back to float -> converted back to sound so there was a little delay when it come to receiving the sound.
-Setting up the Oculus and getting it to display properly along with the position tracker was extremely challenging.

## What's next for ConferenceVR

Web Interface for corporations, schools, etc. to customize their conference area.
Live speech translation to allow for language-independent global communication.

We hope to add in more features such as Facebook authorization, having profile pictures that are parsed from Facebook, population/attendance for data visualization, and much more. There is no end to the number of new features that can be integrated with our platform.