A digital living room

My MSc Dissertation project, A Digital Living Room, was a solo full stack web development and research project that took place in 2023. The project was primarily focused on the building of a web application, enabling multiple users to play video/audio files in automatic synchronisation with each other. 

Through the use of various web technology tools I built a web-application that delivers this functionality and more. Among the tools used were:

• Laravel 10.x web development framework

• Laravel-websockets broadcasting driver for providing real-time asynchronous bi-directional web communication between client and server via a WebSocket server

• Livewire framework for dynamic back-end data manipulation

The project also delved into the social theory behind providing a positive social experience in the app, and introduced elements and features guided by such ideas, using front-end tools such as Laravel Vite, Bootstrap 5, and JavaScript. The creation process of the web app spanned ~3 months and involved the use of CSS, HTML, PHP, JavaScript and the Laravel Blade template engine.

Features

• Full media synchronisation capacity via WebSocket

• Dynamic file uploading + serving via HTTP server and Livewire

• Fully dynamic frontend interaction and backend manipulation using WebSocket + Livewire

• User account creation + user friend system

• Guest account support with automatic account deletion

• Private room creation, rooms linked to user accounts

• Private room live chat box

• User permissions hierarchy within private rooms

• Playlist creation and storage

• Sitewide notification system

• Emoji reactions