University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: Nahrstedt to Shake Off Zoom-Fatigue With an Augmented-Reality System for Virtual Meetings

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: Nahrstedt to Shake Off Zoom-Fatigue With an Augmented-Reality System for Virtual Meetings. “The COVID-19 pandemic has forced hundreds of millions of people to interact with each other over online videoconferencing systems instead of meeting face-to-face—and no one would deny that tools like Zoom have made the pandemic far easier to cope with. However, such services provide only an unnatural-seeming meeting environment that emphasizes participants’ isolation and potentially leaves them feeling marginalized, unseen, uncomfortable, and less able to focus, resulting in less productive conversations. Now, under a new grant from the National Science Foundation, Illinois CS professor and Coordinated Science Laboratory director Klara Nahrstedt will lead a timely effort to create a next-generation, mixed-reality, immersive meeting environment that offers attendees a vivid experience that better simulates the feeling of in-person conversations.”