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.