Over a year has passed since the Corona virus was first reported and came into our lives. Despite our hopes, it seems like post Covid life will not be much more different from now. We will not be able to go back to how we lived before. Due to these circumstances, social distancing is expected to play a key role in the future.
Ever since social distancing and contactless era has begun, people have gone through so many changes. Face-to-face meetings, schools, and works are no longer part of our daily lives. As a university student here in South Korea, I haven’t had the chance to step my foot on campus for over a year now. With all my classes proceeding through online sites, I don’t need to. I use zoom meetings, e-class websites and online quizzes to do what I need to do. Despite some of the challenges, such as not being able to communicate well or having connection issues with the Internet, it has been actually quite convenient after I had some time to adjust to the new situation. It allows me to save time. I work more efficiently and fast. Advantages like these lead to a new future. According to South Korea’s Ministry of Education’s survey, 71.1% of the professors are willing to conduct online classes and 71.9% of the university students thought that it was necessary to continue online courses even after the pandemic officially marks its end.
With this uprising trend, ‘Ontact Fair 2021’ was held at COEX to highlight the importance of the contactless industry. The business industry is changing as well just like the education environment is. I was able to see various conglomerates, medium and start-up companies like Kakao Enterprise, Toss Lab, and Amazon Web Service that were in preparation for the contactless future. Some of the tools that the fair exhibited were perfectly suitable for digital contactless trend, such as video conferences, network and security, education techs, VR and AI.
One of the key speakers for the conference, Seok Young Lee, a vice president of Kakao Enterprise, talked about a work messenger system in the preparation for the post Covid. Since workers are currently working from home and would like to maintain this schedule even after Covid ends, similar to how the universities want to keep the online class system, he explained that the work messenger platform such as ‘Kakao Work’ would be useful and efficient in communication. This explains how fast our future’s trend is changing.
Social distancing environment is no longer a temporary system. It will go on and start a new evolution. So if you want to get informed of this trend earlier, this ‘Ontact Fair 2021’ may help you in catching up with the companies of the contactless business industry and their new technologies.
Yewon Shim
K-UNIV Reporter
