Series of Rooms Like a Family Gathering

How to implement?
1

Is the following possible with openVidu? Whether out of the box or with some custom development?

Living in the time of Corona Virus has forced many of my life’s cherished events onto Zoom including school, work and personal life. What I miss is the ability to have dynamic conversation formats. For example, at a family gathering, you may spend a few minutes talking 1:1 with a cousin. Then switch conversation partners. Then your parents join convo and the conversation circle changes again. Meanwhile, there is a group conversation happening in the kitchen between 5 people where more and more people are joining. And off to the side 2 people having a private conversation who do not want to be interrupted.

Are there any solutions on the market that allow for this dynamic “multi-room” approach?

Some of the features I am imagining:

  • A lobby where a user can pick what conversation they want to join.
  • People in the conversation can welcome others or lock their conversation
  • There can be some automatic switching that users can opt into. If a user has this feature turned on then when the clock runs down you are placed into a new conversation.

The app Houseparty which is very focused on a younger audience has some of this feature set but how about for users who do not want to download the app, create a houseparty acct.

Could you see a use for this sort of thing?

2

Sure, all of the points you mentioned are achievable with OpenVidu. You just need to implement an application that manages all of those situations with its own logic.

For example:
A) The lobby you mention would just be a list of OpenVidu Sessions the user may join
B) This can be easily implemented by the applications server without any use of OpenVidu.
C) This is just disconnecting from the current OpenVidu Session and connection to a new one. The process being managed by a countdown is just a matter of programatically setting the moment of new connection at the desired time.

I agree Houseparty is very focused on younger people. Don’t get me wrong, OpenVidu team actually met months ago part of the technical team of Houseparty in a meetup in Madrid, and their technology is pretty impressive :slight_smile: But their target market is indeed a young audience. I agree that some of their application features could be interesting. As said, all of that can be implemented by your application. OpenVidu only manages the video streams being published and being received in a video conference room (or Session as we call it).

Regards.