Connected AR for Combating COVID-19

Abstract

Combating COVID-19 requires everyone to be aware of her surroundings, which may lead to the risk of infection, such as the density of persons nearby, fever status, and cleanliness of objects like doorknobs. Nevertheless, most of these situations are invisible to humans and are not recognized by them. This motivates us to leverage start-of-the-art wearable AR/MR devices such as Microsoft Hololens with high-capability sensing technologies to understand our activity space. This article addresses our challenges to recognize such situations by wearable AR/MR devices. Furthermore, we design a secure platform named Secure Connected AR Platform (SCARP) to share the detected information among those people who reside in the spatial space, in a privacy-aware fashion if the data is privacy-sensitive (e.g., body temperature). The significant feature of SCARP is that it does not require those people to register their personally identifiable digital IDs (e.g., email addresses) to access the platform and obtain the secured information. We hope this concept helps to reduce the risk of COVID-19 infection in places such as restaurants, airports, stations, and shopping malls, and bring the new normal there.