MikeMareen/Depositphotos: Amazon Marketplace
Amazon’s Covid-19 blog posted a grand reveal— their robotics initiatives team has come up with a brilliant tool to aide social distancing among shopfloor workers!
The fresh-off-the-blueprint ‘Distance Assistant’ combines augmented reality and artificial intelligence to notify employees of how close they are to another colleague.
Inspired by radar speed check devices, the gadget has a camera with a fifty-inch display. It has the ability to differentiate between people and their surroundings, thereby giving an accurate measurement of person to person distance.
Red circles show the employees breaching the six-feet-apart law, and green circles indicate one’s in the clear. It’s expected to encourage everyone to maintain the mandated safe distance.
What’s impressive is that they hope to open source the new advancement so that outsiders can benefit from the tool as well!
Lawsuits
franky242/Depositphotos: Amazon facing in-house sanitization problems amidst the Coronavirus pandemic
While they seem to be investing quite a lot on relief efforts, Amazon has also been faced with allegations leading to at least two major lawsuits. The concerns stated were lack of safety measures in the warehouses, cramped conditions, and re-using personal protective gear.
This is despite a massive $4 billion spent on masks, gloves, pay benefits, and sanitization.
Augmented Reality is in Demand
The new gadget is a welcome addition to the workplace and shows how it can be even more useful in other settings. Crowded and high-risk spaces like airports and shopping malls could greatly benefit from this technology.
Amazon’s not alone in this step, with Snapchat introducing new lenses that enable users to visualize proximity with other people. Tech giant, Google, has also launched a distancing-app called Sodar using AR.
Apple AR Glass – Future of the workplace wearable tech
Soon, AR smart glasses could be tweaked to provide the same notifications about interpersonal gaps and make it easier for users to ensure they maintain the recommended spacing proactively.
AR Can Go Beyond
Rokid Vision: AR tech will help in social distancing
Social distancing isn’t the only amazing use AR glasses can offer against the pandemic. Pioneer companies in the field of AR are already on the path of perfecting and integrating thermal imaging into AR headsets, making temperature checks and detection that much simpler.
The initially high cost makes it slow for companies to adopt the new tech. But the need for innovation with the risks getting greater each passing day would lead them there soon.
Tech Wars
The scientific and technological advancements might have an incredible impact on heightening workplace safety. Yet, it also raises concerns about workers’ privacy.
While it can help so much with technicalities, being so dependent on computer-driven solutions could give birth to false accusations and rejections from the public.
Management would need to know where to draw the line and ensure their trustworthiness to employees. All in all, AR has made leaps and bounds in such a short period, and we hope it keeps providing more innovative answers to the many questions we face with the crisis at hand.
