The Indian government suggested that Indians need to aggressively work on homegrown technologies and develop them so that they are on par with technologies developed by global giants.  This push comes on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic which forced the government to enforce a strict lockdown which has exceeded two months.  The economic struggles are slowly becoming apparent as the shutdown has impacted millions of businesses across the country.  In order to stabilize the economy the Prime Minister of India Mr. Narendra Modi suggested Indians should focus on locally sourced products as a first priority.

During the lockdown chances of hearing about online video calling applications like Zoom, Google Meets and Microsoft Teams are very high as a lot of businesses which went remote have used one of these softwares as part of team communications.  The Indian government has identified and shortlisted ten Indian companies to develop a Made In India video conferencing solution.  These companies include Zoho, HCL, PeopleLink, Aria Telecom, CyberHorizon Corp, Instrive Softlabs, PeopleLink Unified Communications Sarv Webs, Soulpage IT Solutions, Techgentsia Software Technologies and Data Ingenious.

Each of these companies would receive 5 Lakh INR to develop a prototype similar to Zoom or Google Meets.  The government would then shortlist three companies out of the ten and grant them 20 Lakh INR, to develop the video conferencing platform.  The government would finally select one of the three companies to provide the final build which would be used by Central and state governments as an alternative to Zoom and Google Meets.

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After the third round, the government would select the best solution which will get the final contract.  The contract is said to be for a period of four years.  In the first year, the government is expected to pay INR 1 Crore to the selected startup while additional INR 10 Lakh would be given to the company in the next three years for operations and maintenance of the solution.

The Project was undertaken by the Ministry of Information Technology and as a part of the push to promote Indian software products.  The video conferencing solution should be able to work in low bandwidth areas without any glitches.

The lockdown and quarantine measures implemented in multiple countries meant that people could not commute to work or go outside for social gatherings.  This scenario hugely benefited video calling and conferencing platforms and applications.  Zoom, Skype, Facetime, Google Hangouts and Houseparty have seen a phenomenal spike in daily active users.  Facebook has joined the club by finally upgrading its messenger capabilities.  

Facebook Messenger is a chatting and video calling application developed by Facebook.  Facebook is finally introducing a new feature in messenger named Messenger Rooms.  The free feature will allow Facebook and Messenger users to create group video calls of up to 50 people, contrary to the eight people limit available currently.  The Messenger Room does not require a Facebook account and works similar to the Zoom meeting rooms.  Participants can join the room by clicking on a link.

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The rooms do not have any time limit which lets people converse indefinitely.  There are a slew of other features like augmented reality filters, normal filters, virtual masks and a feature to lock the rooms.  Facebook also announced that it is doubling WhatsApp’s video call person limit from four  to eight people as well.  However the Messenger Rooms feature is not immediately available and Facebook will roll the feature out slowly in all the regions it operates.

In a company blog post,Facebook said that 700 million accounts participate in calls everyday between Facebook and WhatsApp.  Once Facebook announced this news, shares of the video calling company Zoom fell down by 5%.

When news about a new type of virus broke out, the world was not ready for what was to come.  The Novel Coronavirus or COVID-19 virus originated in Wuhan province of China. This is now established as the  epicenter/epicentrum that quickly paralysed the entire Country, before the virus spread to other countries.  Currently, the virus spread to almost every nation on the planet with Italy, Spain, America and Germany being some of the worst affected countries.

The virus seems to have finally subsided in Wuhan and life is slowly returning back to normal.  However, when the virus was at its peak, ventilators were the need of the hour. The virus affects the respiratory system and symptoms include difficulty in breathing.  Beside the lockdown which played a part in controlling the spread of the virus, ventilators supplied by Huber & Ranner, a German company played a vital role in combating the illness.  

However, the technical team could not travel from Germany to Wuhan in order to install the ventilators and demonstrate how to use them.  This is where a Bangalore based startup BlinkIn, stepped in to the rescue. According to reports, BlinkIn developed an augmented reality (AR) product named Scotty to provide visual guidance to the technicians in Wuhan.  They did this based out of their office in Pocking,Germany. All that the technicians in Wuhan had to do was to click on a link to see a visual demonstration.

Scotty was unlike the other AR products available currently and what makes it special is its simplicity of use and the ease of deployment.  Scotty uses WebGL, a JavaScript API(Applications Programming Interface,) to render graphics on to a compatible browser. Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of BlinkIn, Harshavardhan Kumar says “WebGL lets you access a mobile phone’s GPU (graphics processing unit) to run computer vision algorithms. That’s how we bring AR experiences through the Web rather than a mobile app (sic.)”   All the technicians at Wuhan had to do was point their phone screen at a ventilator and an installation point, and the AR markers helped indicate how to set the ventilators up as a technician walks through with instructions over voice communication.

The idea behind Scotty was to use lightweight technology in order to provide just enough AR support to get the job done ‘then and there.’  Scotty requires minimal computational power unlike traditional AR, which relies heavily on heavy downloads, graphics processing units and figuring out how to use it.

It is truly wonderful to see how different technologies are adapting to these uncertain times and it will certainly be interesting to see how AR can be merged into other technologies as well in the future.

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