Do you feel like you’ve been learning and working every day since you started your career, but the speed of your learning still can’t keep up with the pace of technological development? In the past, jQuery dominated the front end, but it didn’t take long for jQuery’s “alternatives” to emerge. Many new projects use front-end frameworks such as React Native or Vue. UI frameworks also emerge in an endless stream, MintUI, WeUI, Cube UI, Vant UI, etc.

Mobile app development faces a similar situation. The popularity of Flutter has increased since its 1.0 release last year. There are also rumors that Google is planning to replace Android with Fuchsia within five years, and Fuchsia is also linked to Flutter. Since learning is endless, it is necessary for us to master the correct learning methods and learn in the most efficient way.

Fast and efficient learning methods:

1. Basics matter. There are no shortcuts to effective learning. For beginners, the first thing is to play a good technology step by step. Whether it’s reading a book or watching a video course. It also helps to apply what you have learned later, even by analogy.

2. Practice. You can’t learn programming by reading books. Only by practicing and thinking can you program your own theory.

3. Use fragmented time wisely. They say that a person’s growth depends on the time he spends outside of work. Make good use of fragmented time and build on it to make your learning more productive.

4. Learn to share. With technology changing so fast, there’s a lot to learn. It is more efficient to communicate with your peers and learn from each other’s strengths rather than doing your own research.

Right now, one of the best ways to spend more of our shredding time doing more practice and connecting with more people is to participate in a competition. One such competition is currently being recruited around RTC technology. (See end of article)

## First what is RTC technology

It’s a concept we’ve been spreading since the beginning. RTC refers to real-time audio, video, and text message interaction.

In other words, technologies that allow you to interact with another person in your app via text, images, audio, video, etc., fall under the RTC category.

So, in this game, you can:

  • Audio and video interaction with Agora Native/Web SDK

  • Agora real-time message SDK to achieve notification, barrage, control messages

  • Agora recording SDK to achieve audio and video recording

  • You can also add beauty, voice change, face recognition and other functions.

What scenarios can RTC technology achieve

This problem, we can learn from the “predecessors” of creativity.

First stage: to achieve an online chat, so easy

A senior Android engineer shared his attempt. He developed a one-to-one video calling app based on the Agora SDK.

Since the built-in codecs in the SDK already solve the problems of echo, noise, etc., on all models, for any developer, You only need to call basic interfaces such as joinChannel, setupRemoteVideo, leaveChannel and switchCamera to complete such an application. [Read detailed development review]

Add ARKit, let reality and virtual integration

Huawei and Orange recently did an amazing Demo in Spain, where they made holographic video calls over a 5G network.

Although we don’t have A 5G network yet, we can still combine reality and virtuality to make a video call in an AR scenario.

What needs to be done is to use ARKit to realize plane detection in the live scene, and then use the custom video source and renderer of Agora SDK to display the video call picture in the form of AR in the video call picture, as shown in the following figure. [Read detailed development review]

Keep up with the trend and combine with Flutter

Agora SDK supports React Native, Electron, Flutter, as well as Qt, Swift, Kotlin and other languages, and Python support is on the way.

In our essay campaign, which ended last month, One of the great Flutter thinkers in the Nuggets tech community, Djos, played with the Agora Flutter Plugin. A video calling application was built on Flutter. [The original text is here]

Application development is simple, requiring only a few lines of interface invocation. The Agora Flutter SDK displays video performance well, almost identical to Native’s. “The CPU usage of the Flutter SDK is always in single digits and memory usage is not too high,” he wrote. Without worrying about performance and building a video app quickly, you can also try something different with the Agora Flutter Plugin this online hackathon.

Step up: Drive with live Camera

Three engineers from Shanghai have combined the Agora SDK with a smart car to develop an innovative project of real-time video remote viewing through a smart car. The work was completed in a 48-hour Hackathon. They won first place in the offline hackathon. [Read more here]

The project is divided into three parts: car driver and camera end, mobile phone control App and car end, server end and Web end. Three team members have their own strengths, and one is responsible for part of the project. However, this project really tested the team’s technical range, from driver, embedded, mobile application development, server side to Web side. To see how they developed each part, check out this article. The final demo was also amazing, and it was hard not to win an award.

Think different: Control video calls with your mind

These are just three small examples. Last year, an overseas team tried using a brain-computer interface (check out Emotiv, an American brain-wave mind controller) to control computers and make video calls.

From the above examples, I believe you can also think of RTC technology can be combined with what technology? In addition to basic audio and video calls, you can also use the Agora REAL-TIME messaging SDK to make bullets, pop-ups, etc., and use the real-time recording SDK to record video calls. Join the collaborative whiteboard for a “draw and guess” game; You can also add graphics technology’s face fusion API to change the subject of the call to a “pig head.” From voice changes, beauty, whiteboards, to open source hardware, and even drones and AR glasses, it’s worth trying.

As long as the creativity is not identical, emulating any of the above poses will be a chance to win a prize. In short, all kinds of ideas can be easily realized as long as you use your imagination. What are you waiting for? Come sign up and join us for fun!

AI in RTC Innovation Challenge officially opened on July 1st. The online contest consists of three separate challenges: “Programming Challenge”, “Super Resolution Image Quality Challenge” and “Super Resolution Algorithm Performance Challenge”.

Developers who participate in the “Programming Challenge” will be able to create real-time audio and video, real-time messaging, audio and video recording, and more with the help of the Audio Network Agora SDK. As long as the original app, all can participate. In addition, contestants will get bonus points if they add AI-related features to their apps. The winning team will receive cash prizes & prizes from LeanCloud and Aurora.