Photon

A venue you walk into, running on real-time video.

Client
Undisclosed
Category
Live event platform
Platform
WebRTC and WebSockets
Outcome
Handed over to the client's engineering team
Arriving at the Photon venue: a rendered conference centre with delegates outside, and a login panel asking for a number to receive a one-time password

At a glance

Challenge
Run a live event online without it collapsing into a grid of video tiles, and keep hundreds of people talking to each other, not just watching.
Approach
A virtual venue with live sessions, built on WebRTC for real-time video and WebSockets for everything two-way: chat, polls, requests and presence.
Result
A working real-time platform, built as a modular codebase and handed over to the startup's own engineering team to carry forward.
Stack
WebRTC, WebSockets, live event architecture for concurrent participation, modular front-end engineering.

The brief

A live event platform engineered for real-time video, streaming and interaction.

Photon is a working name. The client hasn’t disclosed the product publicly, so it is described here without naming it.

Most online events are a video call with a bigger audience. Photon was built as a place instead: attendees arrive at a venue, sign in, find the session that’s starting and take a seat in the auditorium while the speaker is live on the screen in front of them.

The Photon auditorium: rows of seats facing a live video feed on the main screen, with a speaker badge, a live indicator, attendee avatars and an open poll
A live session, seen from a seat in the auditorium

Real-time, two ways

The hard part isn’t the video. It’s everything that has to happen while the video plays.

  • WebRTC

    Real-time video and live media between participants.

  • WebSockets

    Low-latency two-way messaging for chat, polls, requests and presence.

  • Concurrency

    An architecture built around many people in a session at once.

  • Modular code

    Structured so the client's engineers could take it forward.

The session schedule in the venue: a keynote listed with its time, speaker and a Starting soon noteThe attendee directory and message wall, with delegates listed by name and role, over an isometric map of the venue
Find the session, find the people

The parts people remember

What makes an event feel live is being able to reach someone: ask a question, answer a poll, request a word in private. Each of those is a real-time message, and each had to arrive while the video kept running.

Not a broadcast. A room.

A private chat request panel: Juan Bailey has requested a private chat, with approve and reject optionsA live poll over the session video: Can you see the video? with yes and no counts and the total votes
Private chat requests, and live polls during a session

Built to hand over

Photon was built for a startup and then handed to its own engineering team, so the codebase was structured to be taken over rather than maintained by us.

That is the part worth saying plainly: the work was at the real-time communication layer, not only the interface on top of it.

Capabilities

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