‘In person’ meetings for business may become things of the past, says S.Ananthanarayanan.

The need for isolation, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, has magnified the role of the Internet.

Pandemics of the past, perhaps more serious than the present one, took years or decades to spread, and for means of control to be put in place. In contrast, the current-day mobility of people, air travel, greater activity and crowding within cities, have helped COVID-19 engulf the world within a space of months. And, at the same time, our higher scientific understanding and skills, and most of all, means of instant communication, have enabled response and measures that could match the challenge the modern economy has created.

Along with the speed of research into the virus, the vaccines, and sharing of data and information, technology has helped the world of commerce and industry to adjust very quickly to working without travel and face-to-face meetings. Offices of all kinds, commercial or government, have introduced ‘work-from-home’, and meetings and multi-party consultations, which are a vital element in management, are being carried out by means of the video conference. With shopping areas closed and public transport largely suspended, in cities, at any rate, e-commerce and ordering on the Net have become the rule. Education has moved to the Internet and ‘webinars’, or seminars held over the web, are daily events.

The e-commerce portals, which accept orders from individual clients who connect from their computers or mobile phones, have been around for some years. In these applications, the portal can accept connections from multiple clients, and process their orders, all at the same time, – presenting to each user the merchandise on supply and then recording their order. Once complete, the customer is connected to a bank or a credit card operator, to make the payment, and physical supply is initiated.

The video conference is more complex. The connection is not separately between clients and the portal, but with all the clients presented on the same screen. And then, there are both the living image, and voice, that are transmitted, for display to all the participants, as a conference. The use of the technology has become common and the word, ‘workplace’ does not mean a fixed location any more.

With the periods of lockdown, and restrictions, ‘coming in to work’ is no longer feasible in most organisations. With employees being permitted, or required, to work over the Internet, organisations have recognized the benefits, the economy and the flexibility of doing entirely away with the fixed office. While there is every possibility that pre-COVID conditions would continue for a long time, even if they are relaxed, it looks like a great percentage of employees would now work from wherever they can connect electronically to the office or their colleagues. The sooner organisations recognize and adapt to this change, the more competitive and successful they would be.

Even traditional face-to-face encounters, like court proceedings and arbitration, are now taking place through the video conference. While the Supreme Court is efficiently disposing of cases, this manner of working helps courts with benches in different cities. As hearings are now through the Internet, judges do not have to travel and more cases are being disposed of.

While business and commerce have readily adapted to video conferencing, a criticism with its use in courts and tribunals is that observing the demeanour of a witness, or for a witness to see how the judge or an advocate reacted to her deposition, is generally not possible – as the setting is no longer the court, but the participants in their own homes. “You only see a flat picture, without eye contact, and coordinated movement, which we have in face-to-face communication,” was considered the reason that ‘teleconferencing,’ as it was known some years ago, did not take the place of people travelling to meet.

This gave rise to the idea of ‘tele-immersion,’ the creation of a ‘shared virtual space,’ where one saw not faces on a screen, but ‘moving sculptures’ in a life-like, 3D space. The idea dated from 1968, when Ivan Southerland, American scientist, regarded as the pioneer of computer graphics, created a ‘virtual world,’ where participants wore helmets with a pair of display screens, one before each eye. The helmet sensed movements, as the participant moved through the virtual location, and the images in each of the screens were what should be seen by each eye, to create the ‘3D’ effect. This was followed by ‘virtual reality’, which combined separate ‘virtual worlds,’ head-mounted displays projecting images of the different participants, over a computer network.

An early version, in 1989, was RB2, or ‘Reality built for two,’ which enabled the participants to see representations, called ‘avatars,’ of each other. These were simple, cartoon-like figures created by computer graphics, but their movements were transmitted, to convey a sense of presence, emotion and locus of interest. Tele-immersion was demonstrated in principle by computer scientist-writer, Jaron Lanier, in the year 2000.

Presenting ‘whole scene’ pictures for each eye, several times a second, involved sets of cameras and processing, at either end, and communication bandwidth that was not easy at the time . A good part of the processing was by algorithms that treated the images as ‘overlapping triads’, so that only the data of changes had to be transmitted. Nevertheless, ‘latency’ introduced by optical fibres, and reassembly of huge numbers of data packets received over the Internet, did not allow the technology to proceed beyond video games.

Holographic display

Closer to the vision of real-time 3D is the switchable holographic display, developed at the University of Cambridge a few years ago. The hologram is a transparent sheet that contains a pattern that records the light that falls on the sheet from two sources – one is an illuminating laser and the second is the reflected light from the object illuminated. As the light from the two sources reaches the sheet at slightly different times, there is interference of light waves, which causes a pattern of highs and lows. The result is capture of images in 3D, in the sense that when the sheet is later viewed under the same laser, the images can be seen in depth, seeing ‘around’ objects as one moves from one end of the sheet to another.

The Cambridge team reported in the journal, Physica Status Solidi, the use of a new pixel element, which could be rapidly switched from one state to another. The hologram pattern could then be refreshed, several times a second, so that movements in the image being transmitted could be seen by the viewer without the need for helmets or goggles, at either end. The quality of images, however, was low. A team at the Data Storage Institute in Singapore, has done better, with an array of ‘spatial light modulators’, but it is a work in progress.

Hologram Incident light and light from an object can be likened to ripples caused by two stones dropped in a pond. The ripples interfere when they meet and would ‘add or annihilate’. There would thus be a pattern of ‘high and low’ along any line drawn across the wave train. Now, if this pattern along the line were converted into a ‘key’, with teeth where there were ‘downs’ and gaps where there were ‘ups’, then the key could reproduce the pattern from which it was made. Now, if this pattern along the line were converted into a ‘key’, with teeth where there were ‘downs’ and gaps where there were ‘ups’, then the key could reproduce the pattern from which it was made.200722.VirtualRealityAndVideoConferencing.Hologram

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Do respond to : response@simplescience.in -------------------------------------------