This research would have been well underway before Covid-19 appeared. It's a very interesting area, and has been for a while. Just look at the neat pictures in

This research would have been well underway before Covid-19 appeared. It's a very interesting area, and has been for a while. Just look at the neat pictures in the article! I did my PhD on mesh-free approximations in the 2000s, and this kind of research has been picking up steam for decades as people exhaust possibilities for meshing and gain computing power.