A New Study of Integration Between Social Robotic Systems and the Metaverse for Dealing with Healthcare in the Post-COVID-19 Situations

With the popularity of the metaverse, researchers are turning to augmented reality and virtual reality to innovate their recent pain points, particularly healthcare issues during COVID-19. At the same time, social robots can be a great tool for alleviating many challenges during the pandemic. However, before the integrated technology's possibilities for the metaverse and social robots can be suitably harnessed, certain recent developments for integration during the pandemic should be addressed. For this reason, this paper proposes a new systematic summary of pioneering social robotic systems using the metaverse through immersive experiences from an interdisciplinary healthcare perspective during the COVID-19 outbreak. We also highlight social robots to deal with medical healthcare issues during the virus outbreak both elderly adults and younger people. Moreover, we compare recent metaverse-driven social robotic works for dealing with assisted living and healthcare issues through telepresence and remote interaction during COVID-19. Ultimately, we provide a recommendation and forecast a future scenario for the integration between socially interactive robots and metaverse technology to improve and help the quality of life both in the current COVID-19 situation and in the post-COVID-19 society. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Exploring the Impacts of COVID-19 on Digital and Metaverse Games

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has markedly changed the ways we live and the ways we play games. This is because the situations disrupted by the virus have forced so many people to quarantine and self-isolate. These can lead to many serious problems such as mental and physical health. At the same time, the metaverse, particularly virtual reality and augmented reality, has been very popular in the fields of human-computer interaction and computer science in recent years. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new research work for exploring recent digital games inspired during the virus outbreak to support people in various aspects, such as entertaining people during the pandemic period, enhancing awareness among people about the virus, suggesting preventive measures against the spread of the virus. Next, more specifically, the impacts of COVID-19 on recent games from virtual and augmented realities are examined. We investigate metaverse games to support people during COVID-19 and the post-pandemic period, including enhancing the healthcare education toolkit, simulating health protection protocols, and supporting healthcare workers. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Roles of Artificial Intelligence and Extended Reality Development in the Post-COVID-19 Era

This paper explores recent roles of artificial intelligence and extended reality development during the coronavirus pandemic and then predicts their significant roles in the post-COVID-19 era in an interdisciplinary manner. To begin with, we investigate roles of artificial intelligence in tackling coronavirus during the outbreak since 2020 until today. It has been effectively used for many ways, such as forecasting the spread of COVID-19 on multimodal data using data analytics, preliminary diagnosis the virus disease from specific symptoms using machine learning, and analyzing big data from social media platforms to accurately prevent the spread of virus. At the same time, due to rapid advancement in recent immersive technology and extended reality is a very popular research topic in computer science, we discuss roles of extended reality which has been extensively used during the virus outbreak for various purposes, such as supporting for businesses and education and helping the medical and health care workers. For instance, it can used for supporting psychological recovery from medical treatment for virus patients, reducing the face-to-face interactivity of physicians with the symptomatic patients, and helping people with the use of telemedicine. Next, we present a new summary of integrated roles of artificial intelligence and extended reality development in the post-COVID-19 era in an interdisciplinary perspective. Moreover, we suggest possible directions of artificial intelligence in extended reality which can be used to guide the design of the next-generation human-computer interaction applications in the future. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The Power of Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence During the Covid-19 Outbreak

The Covid-19 outbreak, the disease elicited by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), poses many significant challenges to scientific communities around the world, including computer scientific communities. At the same time, the rise of computer science fueled by advanced in connectivity of social media and smartphones throughout the world, the fields of augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI) have recently grown very rapidly. Augmented reality is an emerging field of a physical scene where the things that reside in the physical world are mixed by virtual world, while artificial intelligence is a popular field for the machine simulation of human intelligence that is programmed to see, think and understand like humans. This paper presents the current development of augmented reality and artificial intelligence during the Covid-19 outbreak. First, we highlight a summary of recent tools using augmented reality to tackle the Covid-19 crisis. For instance, augmented reality-based thermal imaging glasses for detecting virus symptoms and methods of augmented reality on educational tasks that help people overcome the isolation for online learning effectively are reviewed. Second, we discuss an overview of recent tools using artificial intelligence to smartly fight against the Covid-19 pandemic. Our discussion include the artificial intelligence methods to approximate and prepare people for prevention the virus, a method for forecasting of the Covid-19 outbreak using non-linear regressive network (NAR) to predict the size, lengths and ending time of the virus, and susceptible-exposed-infectious-removed (SEIR) model for estimating the outbreak trend of the deadly virus. Finally, we suggest benefits and promising future integrations between augmented reality and artificial intelligence to tackle the research problems after the Covid-19 crisis. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.