Kevin Blair, Connor Crowne, Josh Max, and
Alex Niu (Junior from Newport High School, Bellevue)
June 2021
The Tele-Meeting project is a dynamic and interactive meeting environment designed to explore novel concepts in remote collaboration. Inside our application, users can talk via the WebRTC communication protocol, share their screens on a projector in real time, draw in multiple colors on a digital whiteboard, and interact through both VR and regular desktop sessions; all in a dynamic, extensible, and scriptable virtual room. These programmable “rooms,” known as FireBox rooms, are written in a special dialect of XML and describe the scene layout of models, whiteboards, primitives, and players. Users can switch between different environments at any time using a built-in selector UI, which offers the ability to quickly immerse meeting participants in a variety of different virtual scenarios. Additionally, we provide a RESTful API to both share new rooms and retrieve existing ones via an online, member-curated gallery.
When loading into the application, members of a specific conference are greeted with a 3D lobby that demonstrates basic movement and navigation mechanics. While voice communication is muted for all participants by default, this setting can be changed in a main menu interface. Additionally, a global chat window is provided for those who either lack recording hardware, or are otherwise unable to talk in the meeting space. A default whiteboard and projector combination is provided, which offers the ability to test configuration defaults and experiment with the core functionality of TeleMeeting. After everyone has successfully loaded into the lobby, the host can “teleport” all lobby members into an arbitrary meeting room of their choice; whether it is uniquely tailored to the situation or one of the several starter “template” scenes offered via the web gallery.