Office Portal: A nerdy solution to make distant colleagues feel nearby

[merijndewit]

Hey, I am Merijn! I am currently making a project called Office Portal for my internship. I am currently doing the study software developer (2nd year). I am still a beginner in writing code so contributors are welcome on the GitHub page!

In these times of covid people usually work in separate rooms to prevent the spreading of the virus. When your colleagues are working in separate rooms the office can feel very lonely. So we came up with the idea “Office Portal” and make the project accessible for everyone on GitHub. Office Portal is inspired by the game Portal from Valve. With this project, we are creating 2 portals using a raspberry pi, television, and a camera module. then hang both portals in 2 separate rooms and you will be able to see the other room “through” the portal. With this project, we hope to bring your colleagues a bit closer and make your office feel a bit less lonely.

I’ve written the instructions step by step so everyone even with little experience with a Raspberry pi can follow them.

All the instructions and necessary code to make this project are available on GitHub: http://github.com/merijndewit/Office_Portal

All the instructions for making your own Office Portal are written there from hardware to software. For the software, I made a GUI to make everything a bit easier. This program will help you install all the necessary dependencies and help you setting up the stream. It also has a few extra features: use an led strip or digital portal mast to make it look more like a portal. For the hardware I’ve written in detail what you need and where you need to look out for when buying parts, and how to install everything to make an awesome portal! I’ve tested the program a lot and I was able to stream at a resolution of 1080p with a delay of around 400ms while receiving a stream from another raspberry pi.

I’ve Had a lot of fun making this project. One of the biggest challenges was streaming the video of the camera and receiving the video from the other pi in decent quality and low delay due to hardware limitations. Luckily I’ve found a way to do it with omxplayer and GStreamer. If you just want to stream video from one pi to another without using the python program (doing everything manually) then follow the instructions on this readme: http://github.com/merijndewit/Office_Portal/blob/main/Other.md

I want to say thank you to my internship supervisor: Rens And the company where I did my internship: Rapide

Thanks for reading!

[RonSch]

Dear Merijn, What a great idea, the ability to connect two spaces regardless of the physical distance between those spaces. I can imagine that this can also be very useful after the corona in several ways. It seems to me quite a puzzle to make the use of the portal comfortable. Speed, sharpness and ease of use probably require a lot of memory. It's clever how you can find the balance in this with few expensive resources. The instructions are easy to follow for me, as a non-expert, although I have to read up on some terms. I enjoyed reading it and you have made me curious about what follows. Good luck to you and greetings to your supervisor Rens.

[BasMeek]

What an amazing idea! It would make working solitary so much more fun! Granted you like your colleagues but in my case that's definitely not a problem. I would love to see this idea in action some time! Amazing work!

[PaulienS]

Congratulations! Deep respect for you! It's a very attractive program and easy to use. You made that in a short time while you are only in the 2nd year of your education. That promises a lot. I'm proud of you!

[rensreinders]

Great, we’ll try this at our next company techday.