Google's new AR social distancing tool can keep you safe
So there you are, walking down the street when it occurs to you that you’ve left your mask at home. And to make matters worse, someone without a mask is heading in your direction
coughing up their lungs. Is this person, possibly shedding COVID-19, more than 6-feet away from you? That is the distance recommended by the CDC to make sure that you’re out of range of any possible COVID-19 contamination. According to Droid-Life, Google has a new experiment called Sodar that uses your phone and AR to measure a two-meter ring to show you how far away someone needs to be so that you won’t catch the coronavirus from him (two meters equals a little more than six and a half feet).
Sodar requires the use of an Android phone with the Chrome browser app installed. Open up the Chrome browser and go to sodar.withgoogle.com. Tap on the “Launch” button and you’ll go through a short tutorial that basically tells you to point your phone on the ground so that an AR ring two meters around you can be created. Keep in mind that Sodar will not work on the iPhone, nor will it work on Android with a non-Chrome browser. The idea is to make sure that every person is adhering to social distancing guidelines.
With Sodar, there is no guessing about whether you are a safe distance away from people who are unwittingly spreading the disease.