Impact of social distancing to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 in a virtual environment

A novel strand of Coronavirus has spread in the past months to the point of becoming a pandemic of massive proportions. In order to mitigate the spread of this disease, many different policies have been adopted, including a strict national lockdown in some countries or milder government policies: one common aspect is that they mostly rely around keeping distance between individuals. The aim of this work is to provide means of visualizing the impact of social distancing in an immersive environment by making use of the virtual reality technology. To this aim, we create a virtual environment which resembles a university setting (we based it on the University of Derby), and populate it with a number of AI agents. We assume that the minimum social distance is 2 meters. The main contribution of this work is twofold: the multi-disciplinary approach that results from visualizing the social distancing in an effort to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19, and the digital twin application in which the users can navigate the virtual environment whilst receiving visual feedback in the proximity of other agents. We named our application SoDAlVR, which stands for Social Distancing Algorithm in Virtual Reality.