The pandemic showed the capacity of governments to shut down travel, provide massive social support to keep the economy going, roll out public health campaigns, and even solve homelessness – if only for a while. For courts the pandemic accelerated a move towards greater use of digital technologies that was already underway. In particular, courts pivoted towards greater use of virtual court platforms to conduct many types of hearings. Similar transformations took place in offices, schools and indeed families. The rapid take-up of communication technologies that combined sound and vision provide us with a form of natural experiment, testing out the reliability and acceptability of remote interaction to conduct justice business. It also exposed one of the weaknesses of most current video technologies – their inability to provide adequate spatial cues, including eye contact and directional sound. Most video conferencing systems in current use for courts have participants looking forward rather than at each other. The problem is that these platforms are insufficiently immersive.
Most of the major video conferencing providers are conscious of this limitation and are attempting to enhance their platforms to make them more immersive. [Zoom has what they call an Immersive View and MS Teams Together Mode, Meta is offering the Horizon Metaverse platform for people to meet and work or ply together, as well as what they call hyper-realistic full-body holographic avatars who could inhabit spaces of the metaverse. Pexip, whose technology was used in UK court pilot studies, have special ‘immersive’ features in their video conferencing platform]. If the future is immersive, what would this mean for courts and tribunals? This conference reports about what we know so far and speculate about the future of immersive virtual courtrooms.
