I'm excited that we developed the same thing so close together. I'd be curious what your inspiration was, because maybe it was similar :) We found an article that showed a grandma facetiming to play chess.
We'd recommend checking out Janus webrtc. It worked well for us, and will work on mobile/firefox. We've used it for years, and it's well developed. Video rooms up to 6 people too, so you could have more options for games
Just made it so my kids stuck at home for quarantine could play with grandparents and friends. Will definitely check out Janus. Jitsi was easy to drop in, but mobile would be great.
Had a shower thought today for a video conferencing dating app, to meet people and have virtual dates with activities (like chess? or watching synchronized youtube together? i don't know, what do people do for fun?).
It seems like you had the same motivation as me, connecting with the family. For quite some time it has bugged me how bad the UX on some things are, like photo sharing or video calling. Try to explain to your grandmother how to see shared photos on an iPad, and then try to do look at the same picture while on a call. Impossible!
I voiced this to a friend and he suggested to just create a simple webpage that has a controller and viewer, nothing fancy. Tied together with Shortcuts I was hoping to make a one-click button that initiated a FaceTime call and opened the webpage in fullscreen. The latter part seems harder, due to limitations in Shortcuts, but so far I've successfully been able to have her press the Home-button and then click the bookmark for this service to open the viewer. Perhaps a Jitsi Meet integration is just what I need.
Being able to view pictures this way has been truly amazing. My dad has digitized a lot of old pictures, and it's so engaging for her to explain what farm a given picture was taking on, and who is in the picture. Things like that. She really enjoys it. I don't understand how this isn't built into FaceTime or something similar. Seems like such an obvious thing.
Shameless plug, and be warned it's quite bandwidth intense, in true disruptive start-up fashion it lacks everything, like optimization and security: https://github.com/vegardx/abuela
Not exactly the same, but checkout Tabletop Simulator. It's a 3d play environment which can play very many board games, card games etc. The steam workshop must have tens of thousands of popular board games created within it.
It won't even load the root page at all for me (the connection times out), although if I want to play chess I can just use any communication, even just by telephone. I do not even have a camera on my computer and I don't use video chat, but even by IRC, telephone, radio, anyone, you can easily play chess by computer. However, card games (such as poker) are more difficult to do.
I might later make a telnet service for playing a card game (including also tarot cards, mahjong, Fanucci, etc), so that you can play a card game too, rather than only a chess game.
I open a video call on Skype or Jitsi when playing with friends on boardgamearena. I don't play chess, I play go and never opened a video call when playing with a friend. Of course no video call with strangers. Yet a video call with a large field of view could help to prevent cheating. The setup to gey help from a bot becomes more complex.
It’s just an embedded board from chessbase. I just dropped their embed in and didn’t write that part. If it looks like there’s interest I may write my own that is more mobile friendly.
My kids entered the same room and can see each other but when the first person selects a blitz game type it automatically matches them against a random person.
So they're playing two different games while watching each other.
The room name is sufficiently long and unique. What might we be doing wrong?
Oh no. That's not how it's been working last week! It looks like rooms are being combined now at chessbase??? Will have to figure that one out!
Edit: Looks like either a change at chessbase or a misunderstanding on my part that didn't manifest until the world hit it :/ I've put a message on the site and plan to roll my own based on socket.io and chessboard.js soon. Thanks for letting me know!
My friends and I played euchre at Playok.com and then just made our own Euchre room on Jit.si. We even had a main room and then sub rooms 00, 01, 02 and you'd just join the main room, get assigned a table and jit.si room and then just join both.
We’ll see :). The chat is jitsi’s hosted service. The chess is chessbase’s embedded app. So all server work is 3rd parties who are used to some load. The site itself is just a client side webpage hosted at glitch.me. Could put a CDN in front if it took off.
How the times have changed! I used to play with my grandfather but we played chess-by-mail using special chess postcards where you can write your move and the board position!
The home page has no information about which games it supports and how it works. You could screen record a session, post it to YouTube and embed it in the page.
I'm not 100% sure about how it works but I guess that you can't include a board game ff you don't have any kind of agreements with either the authors or the publishers. Traditional games should be fine.
Maybe if your video technology is good you can work at an agreement with the sites that already have them. A video chat could be something they could pay for.
Hey, everything should be free right now while we're building, since there's bugs.
There's a monthly and yearly, but likely we'll end up charging less for this when it actually launches. How much would be appropriate like $2/m? We want to make the video rooms free up to 6 people, and only charge for developing extra premium games.
6 is a limit for Janus webrtc( https://janus.conf.meetecho.com/) but webrtc itself can handle up to 12 it seems at 720p. It really is dependent on the bandwidth each user can support, unless you add in some backend concatenation like Zoom. (I helped with this)
Don't get me wrong, I love chess, but I really can't see the chess and video chat demographics overlapping much. I mean I think there is a reason why ICC never added such an option to their client.
Hah, maybe not. But My dad and daughter used it to play today, and my kids have used it to play with cousins. Maybe not competitive play, but for quarantined folks, I wanted to replicate playing at a park bench.
I see your point, but I believe it would be exceptionally useful for training, both for newbies and professional that want personalized lessons.
I suggest the author try to experiment with adding some extra features allowing chess teachers to draw moves on canvas (arrows showing piece movements, highlighting cells via keyboard combos, drawing by hand, etc.)
We'd recommend checking out Janus webrtc. It worked well for us, and will work on mobile/firefox. We've used it for years, and it's well developed. Video rooms up to 6 people too, so you could have more options for games