Voice 2D
Add some imaginary distance to your long-distance communication
VOIP applications can be overwhelming: everyone in the room is constantly front-and-centre, and even with some good prioritization algorithms dynamically changing the volume once in a while, it always feels like there's someone right in your face. That'd be like having an in-person chat with 5 people by splitting into 4 clones and walking in front of every one of the other people at the same time every time you wanted to say anything, and, well, that's just inhuman.
Voice-2D attempts to solve this cognitive disconnect by adding in the simulation of distance and positioning into a standard chat application. I (@JacobLuke) was inspired by the various online 3D games which integrate proximity-dependant voice communication, but wanted to strip out the bare essentials and really focus on what works about that (without having to, y'know, build a AAA game).
Project structure
This project consists of two parts:
- A socket-server backend that does all the state management and audio multiplexing
- An Electron frontend for joining chat rooms
Prerequisites
Make sure you have Node-13 andYarn installed. Currently the app doesn't rely on any external dependencies outside of the yarn packages.
Running the app locally
Before running do the following steps:
- Set the environment:
echo 'BACKEND_SERVER_URL=ws://localhost:5000` > ./frontend-electron/.env
- Install packages:
yarn install
Then to build and run both components in dev mode, run:
yarn start
This will bring up the Frontend Electron app and Backend Socket Server, restarting either as the code is changed
Notes
Important the Frontend app currently cannot be run from VS Code's built-in terminal, because requesting permissions on OSX crashes the app for some reason.