How This Bangalore Based Augmented Reality Startup Helped Contain Wuhan Covid-19 Outbreak

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.