The COVID-19 pandemic forced (or perhaps merely accelerated the inevitable) seismic shift towards remote working. It showed how unsustainable – and in many cases entirely unnecessary – it was to write off large portions of each working day to commuting. It is little wonder, then, that as life begins to return to “normal” many of us find ourselves questioning the financial, environmental, and psychological costs of traditional work environments, and gravitate towards new setups which are either hybrid or entirely virtual.

Yet remote working has a prominent “Achilles Heel,” in that most videoconferencing tools and solutions fall well short of the engagement, clarity, and security necessary to create meaningful connections and maximize productivity and creative interactions.

As post-pandemic life returns to something like normality many of us find ourselves questioning the financial, environmental, and psychological costs of traditional work environments
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There are some who yearn to go back to the office due to that lack of a human connection, and business owners and leaders are looking for a middle ground to bridge the two and create a hybrid work environment that fulfills everyone’s needs and lead to better productivity.

Raviv Nadav – Kino by Kinetx Co Founder & Chief Solutions Architect

That is the problem that drives Raviv Nadav, Founder and CEO of Kinetx’ Kino, a platform that he believes could become the solution that bridges the gaps between hybrid work and a remote virtual work environment.

We're gravitating towards new setups that are either hybrid or entirely virtual
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According to him, the Kino video space platform is capable of supporting human connection by creating virtual conversations that feel much more personal.

“Human interaction is organic and personal. Video communication should be too,” says Nadav, pointing to the video below as an example of how his platform enables those personal connections to happen in a natural way, much as they would in real life.

“Social interaction is predominately filled with many conversations happening at once,” he explains. “It’s not some rigid experience where only one person is permitted to speak at any given time. Instead, when a person walks into a crowded room, there is a hum from all the conversation. They can choose to join a group, say ‘hello,’ focusing their attention. As time goes on, they can leave and focus on other individuals or conversations.”

Kino replicates that fluid environment where participants can communicate and shape their virtual experience as they see fit. The tool’s streaming technology allows for a more natural human experience. While others offer a “telephone conference with video” model, Kino is a video space where distance is perceived by manipulating the audio and video of participants that are in the background.

“We developed a focus feature in which the user gets to choose who they like to focus on. Others’ (unfocused participants) video gets smaller and to the side and at 5% audio level. The experience of having focused conversation with other users in the background gives a sense of an in-person gathering where people can roam around and talk to each other freely, just through video,” he says.

So rather than sending a text message to someone and waiting for a response, one can just hop into their colleague’s space and start a conversation with a full face-to-face experience.

“Remote work like we have today is very disengaging as the only face to face option because video conferencing services are glitchy and awkward. There’s no personal feel of talking to someone and really connecting. Chats and casual calls just don’t cut it. As an employer, I love being in touch with my team, seeing their faces and having those laughing moments at work where we just hang and chat. Well, we at Kinetx Co, do it remotely through our Kino platform where we can engage in one-on-one conversation but still have the ambience of an office. We work remote – but never alone.”

And that is the utopian picture that he paints of the techology’s potential to bring people together, rather than keeping them apart.

“Since the 1960’s we have had the trend of the Global Village, where all parts of the world got interconnected and, in a sense, unified. I think our economy and society is getting there,” he says referring the fact that his own team is dispersed all over the world but routinely shares the same virtual office space on Kino. “We should remember technology is an “add-on” to our lives but it should never replace the small joys in life like meeting one another in person,” he says, adding that we’ve never before been able to connect the way we are able to today.

There are some who yearn to go back to the office due to that lack of a human connection
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“As technology evolves, and we with it, new opportunities arise, and tools for real-time communication like Kino can push the global market to the next stage of international hiring and collaborating, thus distributing wealth and perhaps expediting human evolution to the next step. Working as one has always brought great achievements in the past. This is no different. We’re simply Better Together.”

Human interaction is organic and personal. Video communication should be too
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Alice Bonasio is a technology journalist, communications consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Conversations vs Chaos: Creating Meaningful Virtual Connections appeared first on Tech Trends.

At the start of 2020 (remember those giddy, carefree times before the pandemic struck?) Unity asked more than a dozen industry experts – including yours truly – to share their thoughts on how immersive technologies would be embraced for a report entitled Top 2020 Trends: Enterprise AR & VR.

All signs were pointing to 2020 being a breakout year for immersive tech, and, as it turned out, this was one of the few things not to have been derailed by COVID-19.

With the widespread need for social distancing and shift towards remote work, companies turned to immersive technology tools such as real-time 3D, AR, and VR to connect employees for remote collaboration, replace events and exhibitions, and allow teams to work in offices, labs, and sites from afar. As the need to support employees remotely grew more urgent, this was reflected in the accelerated adoption of XR across the board.

Microsoft, for example, has seen a 13x increase in remote assistance usage over the past 12 months, and Unity believes that this general trend is likely to continue in 2021.

All signs were pointing to 2020 being a breakout year for immersive tech, and, as it turned out, this was one of the few things not to have been derailed by COVID-19
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Some of the key findings from the report include:

The use of mixed reality will expand to enable more human connections

Mixed reality has traditionally been used to aid in task completion, however, the pandemic has sparked the need for tools that mimic human connection and proximity to create more productive work environments and collaboration.

Cross-functional collaboration across immersive media will grow

2020 has seen more users looking for ways to collaborate remotely from multiple geographic locations, using media that mimic real life. Expect that to continue into 2021.

VR will prove even more useful in the workplace

The disruptions of COVID-19 have led many to look for creative ways to solve new and old problems across the workplace, such as keeping skills fresh, engaging learners without in-person training, improving employee productivity, and fostering collaboration and connection among teams.

Jeremy Dalton, Head of AR/VR PwC believes that in 2021 and beyond we will see a wider range of businesses across numerous industries become more comfortable with emerging technologies that they would otherwise have left on the sideline until pressured to innovate.

While computers will never fully replace the value of in-person connection, Fleckenstein believes there is a tremendous opportunity for more immersive collaboration, and 2021 will see mixed reality evolve beyond task completion and emerge as the ideal medium for human connection.

As the need to support employees remotely grew more urgent, this was reflected in the accelerated adoption of XR across the board
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Futurist and author Cathy Hackl, predicts volumetric video will be a key factor in sustaining this evolution and widespread adoption.

Volumetric video, she explains, can help companies overcome pain points caused by the sudden shift to remote work, since the technology makes it possible to record employees, projects, or scenarios in three dimensions, instead of digitally rebuilding them from scratch for virtual reality simulations.

“The digital video can then be edited and manipulated to be viewed on everything from flat screens to virtual reality simulations,” she explains, adding that experiencing something in 3D with real-life physical movement is shown to increase viewers’ retention of the information being taught.

According to Matt Fleckenstein Senior Director, Mixed Reality at Microsoft, the ROI for firstline workers when adopting mixed reality in enterprise has been significant:

“We’ve seen 90% of touch labor eliminated, errors reduced to zero, and increased employee satisfaction.”

Elizabeth Baron, Enterprise Solutions Executive at Unity Technologies, says “Immersive realities provide probability spaces for enterprises to study any potential reality, or the art of the (im)possible,” with a host of relevant data that is brought to life and experienced rather than merely presented.

“Storytelling with immersive XR can simultaneously bring a spreadsheet to life for an artist and bring a design to life for an engineer,” she explains.

You can access the e-book for free here

For companies looking to get into Immersive technologies our VR Consultancy service offers comprehensive support in strategic deployment of Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post 2021 Immersive Tech Trends appeared first on Tech Trends.

virustrack.live is an open-source resource that lets anyone compare and visualize the spread of COVID-19 across different geographies. The dashboard dynamically cross-references reputable data from repositories including Johns Hopkins University Center for Science Systems and Engineering, BNO News, World Health Organization COVID-2019 Situation Reports, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), US hospital data from Community Benefit Insight and US county data aggregators. All these sources get checked by the platform every five minutes, so what you get is the most up-to-date resource for tracking the COVID-19 pandemic on the web today.

virustrack.live lets you instantly compare and visualize data across regions, states, and countries, empowering responders to flatten the curve and make more informed choices
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The COVIDvu Virus Tracking Team was founded by open source advocate and angel investor Eugene Ciurana, Mystic Coders software entrepreneur Andrew Lombardi, and Farad.ai chief scientist Dr. Juvid Aryaman. VirusTrack.live was built in less than three weeks with volunteer contributions from scientists and engineers worldwide.

“We developed VirusTrack.live because existing maps and dashboards are visually striking but the information they present is qualitative, not quantitative .They don’t display trends or let you compare multiple locations side-by-side in real-time,” explains Ciurana, who came up with the idea for VirusTrack while self-isolating with his family in San Francisco. “VirusTrack allows users to select and compare states, countries, US regions, or continental regions within the same context. The unprecedented severity of this pandemic means information is in constant flux, we wanted this user-friendly decision support system to be accessible to everyone.”

The project is entirely non-commercial, non-advertising, and open-source, and the team is keen to share the resource with global authorities, media outlets, and individuals in order to empower them to make better real-time decisions informed by accurate data.

“Our focus was on data quality and on presenting current, actionable information with a minimum of clutter, ” “Maps look cool, but the information they present is qualitative, not quantitative. The charts from virustracker.live are designed for side-by-side comparison and use the most current data available.”

“We aren’t selling anything or even asking for donations. Anybody can use the tool in any way they like,” Ciurana says, adding that all the virustracker.live website content is freely available for re-publication under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence, which means anyone, anywhere can use the website output for any purpose as long as they credit the COVIDvu Open Source Virus Tracking Team.

This is a work-in-progress and Ciurana hopes to attract a community of scientists and developers to add further features that will make virustrack.live more relevant and useful.

This is a key aspect of the platform, as it can serve as a crowdsourcing action hub for Data Scientists and Engineers keen to contribute towards efforts in mitigating this crisis, building their own tools and running their own experiments against the CSSE datasets. The team invites contributions from the general public, NGOs and government officials, health scientists, and technologists looking for ways to help in this crisis.

“Our focus is on data quality and on presenting current and actionable information with a minimum of clutter,” explains Andrew Lombardi, project co-founder. The charts from VirusTrack.live are designed for easy interpretation.”

The intention is that as more data is collected in the coming days, this accurate, readily available and easily comparable data will empower responders, policymakers, media, and citizens to make agile and better-informed decisions to tackle the challenges ahead.

Dr. Juvid Aryaman, chief scientist at London-based Farad.ai and project co-founder, continued. “We saw this opportunity to distil accurate information from the trove of noisy and contradictory data sources out there. We aim to keep the public informed and to improve planning. In the next few days VirusTrack.live will generate high-confidence predictions of how the pandemic will evolve,” he says.

“We aren’t selling anything or even asking for donations. Anybody can use the tool in any way they like,” Ciurana says, adding that all website content is freely available for re-publication under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

The VirusTrack.live team is keen to share the resource with global authorities, media outlets, and individuals in order to encourage them to make better decisions, informed by accurate data
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We are in uncharted territory with this pandemic, but as COVID-19 continues to spread around the world, we are also collecting a wealth of data that can be leveraged to give us insights into which strategies work
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By studying patterns and comparing the contagion curves from various geographies, it could be possible to more accurately forecast what comes next. Informed, data-driven timely action powered by collaboration might just be humanity’s best hope.

VirusTrack.live welcomes information about data sources, suggestions, and general feedback via feedback@virustrack.live

Alice Bonasio is a XR and Digital Transformation Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Staying Ahead of the COVID-19 Curve appeared first on Tech Trends.