The existing system of technology that Sara and I chose to do is virtual meetings. We chose to do virtual meetings since it has become so important for us in our daily lives and. Video calling has always been a significant part of our lives, since we were able to talk to people who weren’t near us. However, there was a time when only two lines were allowed to connect, meaning that if a third person were to try and join a call, they had to be with one of the people that were already on call. However, this changed with virtual meetings. With time, technology had advanced enough that we were able to have multiple lines on a voice call. Eventually, this expanded to include video calls as well. Especially since the start of the pandemic, there was a huge emphasis on the need to interact with people without seeing them in person. This was when the use of virtual meetings exploded, since everyone needed to participate. One example of this is the platform Zoom, where multiple people can join one meeting and be able to see and hear each other while being remote. This allowed people from all over the world to communicate with each other in one place while we weren’t even allowed to go outside. Zoom was extremely useful with meetings and classes, where both lectures and discussions were taking place.
Our story with virtual meetings can resonate with the heptapods because it is essentially how they are able to communicate with us. An object that the heptapods already have is their looking glass. The looking glasses are described as “twoway communication devices” with the heptapods in orbit, meaning that they were not interacting with the scientists in-person (4). With these looking glasses, the scientists were able to see, hear, and communicate with the heptapods simultaneously in real time. This is essentially what virtual meetings are, except that multiple people/videos are projected into one “room”. Virtual meetings are different from simply connecting two calls together, since those already exist in the heptapod universe (at the looking glasses where the heptapods are able to interact with the humans). They include multiple calls at the same time going to the same digital location, meaning that in the aliens’ scenario, they would be able to connect all of the looking classes together and be able to interact with both the heptapods and the humans all around the world.
In our visual representation, we tried depicting virtual meetings using images only. We have the globe in the center to show that this takes place on a global scale. We have signal towers to show that even though this takes place at different places, they are interconnected with a system of signals. On the left side, we have three separate individuals who all see the same individual on the right side. However, on the right side, that individual can see all three on the left. This shows that there is communication between multiple people on the same service.
