Introduction

We live in a world that is today undergoing, or perhaps by the time you read this, has undergone, a shift due to the novel coronavirus disease, officially called COVID-19. COVID-19 has caused a change in our way of communicating and the way in which we conduct business. Following the outbreak in 2020, schools and universities were shut down for weeks, in some cases months (depending on the location), with classwork expected to be done online. Many venues closed and events were postponed or cancelled, from Disneyland, to conferences and music festivals, to baseball and all other live sports. Governments around the world ordered people to stay home. The world was not prepared for a pandemic like COVID-19.

As we stayed home for weeks, many of us discovered new ways to work, play, educate, entertain, and shop. We also saw new technology become more important, whether it be Artificial Intelligence being used to look at CAT scans, to look for the virus, or to create a vaccine, or new wearable computers used in China and elsewhere to diagnose people with the disease. Plus, having autonomous vehicles or robots preparing our food or delivering it seemed a lot smarter to us all of a sudden.

At home, music artists released performances for Virtual Reality (VR) headsets to keep fans entertained during the weeks when people had to stay home. New virtual events, some of which were being trialled in Virtual Reality, were announced to replace the physical conferences lost for the year. Huge increases in video conferencing usage happened as workers were being asked to work from home. These are early signs of a set of new technologies that promise to deeply transform all of computing. We call this set of new technologies "Spatial Computing."