Inspiration
The outbreak of COVID-19 evolved a worldwide challenge in all areas of human life due to the inevitable social distancing and nationwide lock downs. It has adversely affected many sectors like
• Tourism
• Health care
• Education
• Real estate
• Insurance
• Household maintenance/servicing etc.
The need of the hour is to build concrete solutions to plan a new start to revive our economy.
While quarantining, the students are losing their valuable time to be spent on learning and companionship. At the end of this crisis it wouldn’t be easy to for them to pick up from where they left off.
Also the people who are peripatetic lose their hope due to COVID-19 as they aren’t getting any chance to visit their favourite spot. For this reason, destinations and local entities should propose, now more than ever, an appealing and seamless way to approach all the phases of the holiday journey.
The livelihood of common man is impacted in this crisis and its imperative that we enable them to continue their business as usual.
What it does
Education Virtual reality can help children learn, create and socialize during the pandemic situation. Here we are taking technology initiatives to build Virtual and Augmented experience in storytelling, pre-recorded academic classes, gaming and painting to help children learn and communicate effectively. This could be reused even after pandemic crisis gets over.
Insurance Providing a platform using VR for insured customers to transmit images and videos related to their claims which enable contact centre agents to assess claim immediately.
Healthcare Doctor consultation is one of the integral element of the healthcare system. With the Implementation of VR services at this pandemic situation doctors will be able to provide consistent eye-to-eye contact and also deliver valuable medical advices and treatments to patients without the need of travel to clinics, avoiding long waits for appointments etc.The solution could be reused for aged individuals who face difficulty in travelling.
Tourism The purpose of our application is to take our customers through the virtual reality of tourist destinations like Museum, Art Galleries, paragliding spot, scuba diving, skating,mountaineering,trekking,cycling etc. Another attractive feature is that the customer could share the experience with a real local guide. With co-browsing like features of the system the Guide will be able see the same content as the customer and will be able to explain and guide them through the tour.The solution can be reused for tourists who cannot afford travel cost to the spot.It could also be of interest to physically disabled community.
Real Estate With this application we can create amazing 3D real estate tours and show each corner of the property so that the clients can check them out. Virtual staging (Eg: Showcase house with multiple interior designs, with or without furniture etc) to enhance the promotion of properties. People can check out their hotel rooms/hostels with the help of VR Tours before planning to book.
Household maintenance Using Virtual Reality platform, we onboard customers as well as service providers to register a complaint related to faults identified and to address the complaint respectively. Customers can add photos/images of the faulty appliances or problem areas which need correction. The Maintenance engineers can see the open complaints registered by customers and can provide remedial solutions.The same platform can be extended in future to identify root cause of problems well before site visits and will enable agents to carry relevant tools along with them to get the issue fixed thus avoiding multiple hops between shops and home.Payment may be done online via Debit/credit card. The platform ensure that both the customer and engineer are equally benefitted during lock down conditions.The solution could be reused even after pandemic crisis.
How I built it
HTML, javascript and other opensource libraries are used for building the prototype
Challenges I ran into
Lack of tools and infrastructure as we were informed of this Hackathon very late on 24th Apr and we could hardly find a working development environment using which we can build this application from scratch.Whatever being prototyped is based on our limited availability of tools and infrastructure.
Accomplishments that team is proud of
A working prototype with atleast one module working with its basic functionalities.We had 6 modules in plan. My Team - who were taking this as a challenge to work together to achieve this common goal.I could see people competing to help each other despite of all challenges we have got.
What I learned
As a developer or architect we should be having a working development environment with accessibility to relevant tools,infrastructure etc to try out anything anytime.
Anything is possible with team work and positive attitude!!
What's next for Virtual Business Continuity
• Support visually impaired / handicapped by providing integration to home assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant.
• Platform to provide a provision to upload the videos of location / object by the end-users. The video will be processed using AI and return real-time recommendations to them.
What you have done during the weekend
• Started designing and building an application from scratch.
• Formed sub teams for
o screen design – designed the home page, login page,customer and service supplier registration page, Register complaint page, view complaint page,complaint summary page.
o Development of screens in HTML by relying on freeware platforms.This has drastically reduced our capability to build a flexible platform as many a times we were compromised to limit our functionality to a reduced set.
o Downloaded open source libraries for VR and CO-browsing and bring it up into a usable stage. Integrated the same with view complaint page.
The solution’s impact to the crisis
The solution would enable following services:
• Household services :Avoid the need for service technicians to visit customer’s house to service their request.Service technicians would still have job and would be paid online for the service they are offering.
• Tourism: Customer could still have the feel of visiting their favourite spot despite of the fact that they can’t travel.All that they need would be a VR device.
• Insurance: Insurance companies could still process their claims even without a site visit to understand the damage of a vehicle/house in response to a claim. Insurance company can direct their customers to ‘VR in touch’ application as a part of notifying claims online via which customers can upload the claim images. Later as part of processing the claim, claim handler can call up the customer and send url for co-browsing using ‘VR in touch’ via which claim handler can make use of the image captured during claim notification to advise customer to get more precise picture/video of parts(via co-browsing claim handlers can show customer which part’s image /video they would need more) which help them to assess the claim.
• Education : It would be really boredom for children to attend an online class or study their lessons on their own without their friends’ and teachers’ physical presence.With education via VR, they would feel more engaged and have a feeling that they are attending a real class from their own class room.Children needn’t travel to schools instead their class room is recreated at home during pandemic crisis!
The necessities in order to continue the project
• Currently we have prototyped just for Household services with the minimum free tools available online which has minimal functionalities available. We have prototyped the application based on fixed data as we couldn’t integrate with a database.
• To continue with the project we would need resources like Business Analysts who is good at EU laws(do’s and don’ts), travel and tourism,insurance (specifically claim handling process in direct market),Education sector(who is well aware of teacher’s and student’s requirements in e-learning),hospital management and Real Estate business.
• Below software/tools along with appropriate infrastructure to complete this solution in its entirety.
o Angular8
o Java 11
o SpringBoot – 2.2.6
o MySQL – 8.0
o MongoDB Atlas
o VR Headset
o VR compatible mobile device
o Cloud Infra(AWS/Azure)
o Tom Cat 9
o npm 6.14.4
o Together JS
• Ofcourse, this team without whom nothing would have been possible.
• Support from our company ‘Allianz Technology India’ to take this project to completion by providing necessary support in terms of resource and tools.
The value of your solution(s) after the crisis
• Our solutions could be far-reaching even after crisis in following ways:
o especially for those unlucky people around the globe who can’t afford a travel to the beautiful places in their dream with a much reduced cost.Just imagine you on a Gondola ride through canal Grande in Venice.What fun it would be!
o For those countries who want to promote tourism across the globe.
o For senior citizens who cannot travel and find it difficult to spend a day of their choice.
o For physically disabled people with visual capability to go for a cycling through North sea cycle route of Europe!
o For senior citizens who find it difficult to travel to a hospital or clinic waiting to see their doctor.
o For insurers enabling them to have a quick turn around from a claim processing and risk acceptance(rg:engineering inspections) perspective.Thus avoiding fraud claims and quick processing of claim resulting in genuine claim payments.
o For people who want to buy/rent a house/flat abroad/ remote place but cannot spend money/time for travel on something for which a decision was not yet taken.
o For patients to log an appointment with doctor based on the real time videos/images uploaded based on which doctors can diagnose and advice accordingly. Just the application need to be integrated with hospital management solutions who want to avail this service. This would avoid crowd at hospital and doctors can better manage their work/life balance. Would be a blessings from patient perspective especially for senior citizens/pregnant ladies/people who stay in remote areas that they needn’t travel or wait for an appointment etc.They would be notified once the diagnosis is complete.
o In case of accidents, if the patient can’t be taken to hospital during golden hour, first aid instruction could be provided to the person assisting the patient instantly which might help them in saving their life.
o Virtual Learning Videos can be used for learning as the virtual reality simulations help kids learn by experimenting as if it is real. The way virtual reality apps transform lessons into practical applications, can inspire students to participate and engage more and thereby improve the students learning experience.
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