Because of the COVID19 outbreak, I now teach all of my class lectures at NYU on-line. Our lab holds all of its meetings over Zoom or Google Hangouts. No two people are actually in the same room.
For all of the difficulties this has caused, it has created some positives. For example, I now record all of my lectures for later viewing. This is actually a necessity, since a number of the students are in Hong Kong or other parts of the Far East, half a world away from New York City.
Yet Zoom could never replace physical proximity. Many of the important subtleties of interpersonal communication involve body posture and movement, gaze direction, pointing and other hand gestures, and variations in inter-personal distance.
Inevitably, as we are forced to keep our distance from each other, our on-line tools will improve, providing ways for us to embrace our inherent physicality. As technology continues to advance, meeting on-line will inevitably evolve toward something that will feel quite a bit like meeting in-person.
Ironically, the need to social distance might have the paradoxical effect of making us feel closer to one another.