At the MIT Reality Hack 2022, I joined the Hacking the Hack track to experiment with methods to facilitate remote participation in future events. My team of remote and onsite participants worked together to bridge the gap between online and in person attendees, by creating a mirror portal to give more presence to online members that would not be possible with the online tools available to hackers (such as Discord or Gather).
This mirror portal consisted of a web client on an onsite computer that streamed the physical hackerspace to a virtual chat room built with A-Frame and Networked-Aframe. I helped build this aframe chatroom and found an environmental background to make the space more friendly. I also added VR controls and made sure users with either a keyboard or a headset would be able to interact in the space. We also set up a remote server to host the chatroom networking and a Janus WebRTC server, with the purpose of serving the on-site computers’ web streams to all online users.
Future Work
We have many avenues to improve this into the future. One avenue we explored was displaying depth textures produced by Azure Kinect to have in-person attendees exist next to virtual participants, rather than just being seen through the equivalence of a window.
We can also add more interactions for both virtual and in person users, such as being able to high-five each other or share work through virtual whiteboards.
