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Project Starline: Feel like you're there, together

• Hakeemmidan 5y ago
  This would be incredible for immigrants that haven't seen their families in a long time Can't wait for them (Google) to get there (large-scale production)
• abhv 5y ago
  A good friend of mine at Google is the technical lead of this project (he has a Phd Princeton, and was a professor before joining Google). I've tried it in person and it was truly amazing. They used some very fancy tech when I saw the demo, so I'm thrilled it is finally being announced and possibly shared with a larger audience. Explanation of why it is amazing: It totally fools your perception. No glasses or goggles--but rather an 8k display with special glass that allows your different eyes to see different pixels (a light field). They also optimize the sound, and the rest, so as all the testimonials point out, you actually feel like the person is in front of you. It also works for the "cube" around them, so if they hold up some object, it also feels like that is in front of you. Amazing...
  • bullfightonmars 5y ago
    If this was a consumer product I would buy two of these today, one for myself, and one for my parents. It is more compelling that any product I have seen for a long time.
    • paxys 5y ago
      I imagine it isn't (yet) because of the price tag.
      • bostonvaulter2 5y ago
        And it would probably be very difficult to install at the moment as well.
    • ipsum2 5y ago
      How much would you pay? I expect the lower end to be around $20,000 from hardware alone, plus at least gigabit down/up connectivity.
      • throwaway3699 5y ago
        I doubt you need gigabit for an 8K stream. The real issue is the abysmal common network infrastructure. Latency will be a bottleneck if most ISPs don't care about treating your packets properly.
        • cogman10 5y ago
          Agreed, 10Mbps is likely where it'll be, probably less. If I were to guess, they are going to apply a lot of smarts to texture mapping to avoid needing a lot of bandwidth.
          • IshKebab 5y ago
            You can't even do basic video calling on a 10 Mbps connection. You definitely need the reliability and low latency of fibre for this.
            • deleted 5y ago
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          • kbenson 5y ago
            Doubtful, IMO. The fact that you need it to be both extremely low latency and with essentially zero compression artifacts (probably lossless, based on their goal). If the numbers listed here[1] are correct, then the most efficient lossy codec at that time was doing 100 minutes of 8k video in ~37GB of data. From that we can intuit that it was using an average of 50 Mbps for that 100 minutes of video. For the most efficient codec, and I'm not even sure from that whether it was using lossy or lossless numbers, because apparently HVEC can do both (but I would assume lossy, since it's about streaming video in that case). You can't do weird texture mapping or lossy compression and expect people to really seem like they are there. Even if you don't notice that stuff normally watching a video, I think you'll notice it when you're interacting like someone is really in front of you, and that will throw off the immersion. 1: https://www.quora.com/In-regards-to-filesize-how-big-is-1-minute-hour-of-8K-Video-with-the-H264-HEVC-Codecs/answer/Rudy-Triana-1 https://www.quora.com/In-regards-to-filesize-how-big-is-1-mi...
    • codeecan 5y ago
      https://electronics.sony.com/spatial-reality-display/p/elfsr1 https://electronics.sony.com/spatial-reality-display/p/elfsr...
      • chewxy 5y ago
        This is a 3D monitor. Not a light field display like Starline. The traditional glasses free 3d monitors rely on special coatings on the glass to "split" the direction of a pixel. Some coatings are electronically controlled (like Sony's), some are physical (lenticular filters) It still displays a 2D projection of a 3D image, but twice. By contrast, my understanding is lightfield displays projects the entire volume. So you don't have a pixel, you have a voxel. So each eye gets a different bit of the same voxel
        • deleted 5y ago
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        • mhalle 5y ago
          The term light field display includes lenticulars and parallax barrier displays (and holograms and volumetric displays). They are all different ways of carving up, sweeping out, or multiplexing a light field.
    • CountHackulus 5y ago
      I've used the Echo Show 10 with the drop-in feature for my mom with vision issues (basically can't use touchscreens) and it works fairly well. That said I fully agree with you that something like this would be really excellent. A full-sized person's face and head in 3D is far easier to recognize and understand than a poorly lit 2D 10" display.
  • somebodythere 5y ago
    Sounds super cool. I can't wait for LFD tech to become more accessible to consumers.
    • ortusdux 5y ago
      I've been thinking about pre-ordering the Looking glass portrait. $250 for the unit, and I already have a leap motion laying around. https://lookingglassfactory.com/product/portrait https://lookingglassfactory.com/product/portrait
      • bsanr2 5y ago
        It's neat and I'm waiting to see what creative things people come up with for it. A Japanese developer put together a Wizardry/Megaten-style dungeon-crawler demo: https://twitter.com/mizzmayo/status/1394171128491487234 https://twitter.com/mizzmayo/status/1394171128491487234
  • Valgrim 5y ago
    It sounds like they are using this technology or something similar: https://lookingglassfactory.com/8k https://lookingglassfactory.com/8k
    • deleted 5y ago
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    • hathawsh 5y ago
      Does anyone know whether they're using that tech, something similar, or something else? I've always been interested in light field technology.
    • deleted 5y ago
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  • jayd16 5y ago
    Does it have perceptible regions where the view angles are ideal? If it's as seamless as it looks in the video that would be truly novel and exciting.
  • amelius 5y ago
    Was this display developed by Google, or did they buy it from elsewhere? Is it still on the market?
    • shard 5y ago
      I recall there being glasses-less 3D displays about 10 years ago, when the TV industry was trying to make 3D displays the next new thing. I wonder if this is the same technology.
      • bsanr2 5y ago
        IIRC those were displays that used sterescopy, while these simulate a light field instead.
  • patall 5y ago
    Interesting. Does the light field work only for one person or multiple (they show mother and baby in the video)?
  • jlebar 5y ago
    My mind was also blown when I got to demo this a few years ago. You sit down and you forget that there's technology happening. The person is there, in front of you. I don't know how else to describe it. The testimonials in the video aren't exaggerating compared to my experience.
    • rewq4321 5y ago
      Do you know if it supports multiple people on "screen" at once? Or does it rely on eye tracking of a single person (plus projection of some sort?) to be able to achieve the 3D effect?
      • ehsankia 5y ago
        I don't know anything more than what's been released, but from my understanding, light field display don't rely on eye tracking, and you can have multiple people looking from different angles (although the range may be limited to near the center). In the video itself, the camera filming the interaction is moving independently of the person sitting, and unless it was faked, it was able to see its own perspective.
      • nexuist 5y ago
        It seems like it does, given in the demo video there's a lady and a baby in the same shot.
        • ForHackernews 5y ago
          We don't know if the baby is seeing the full 3d effect, but my understanding of how light-field displays work is that it isn't based on eye-tracking.
    • anon_tor_12345 5y ago
      i got curious (since you said you'd seen this years ago) and found my way to your cppcon 2016 talk. good talk but in particular i want to congratulate you on the weaving pun (first multithreaded tech).
  • tengbretson 5y ago
    Wouldn't there also have to be some kind of head tracking involved? Otherwise you're still limited to just showing a fixed perspective in 3d.
    • wesleyy 5y ago
      No, that's what the lightfield does. You see different physical images depending on your angle to the screen
      • defaultname 5y ago
        Fascinating. So not only is it feeding it an 8K / 30 (60?) FPS image, it's feeding it numerous incident angle variations and displaying all of them simultaneously? Sounds like a monster data rate.
        • ithkuil 5y ago
          https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23316225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23316225 > the 8K is their Input Resolution. > That resolution is then divided into the 45 viewing directions:
          • datameta 5y ago
            Is existing Looking Glass Factory tech the same though? Not so sure about that. Those displays are typically monitor-sized at the largest and not really aimed at displaying a live feed of a person. This looks to be a more seamless experience on a larger screen.
            • datameta 5y ago
              Downvoted, with no response, for posing an open question. Shame on you, honestly.
              • deleted 5y ago
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  • weird-eye-issue 5y ago
    Do you think it's possible 90% of this is due to the studio quality lighting, large high quality screen, good mic/speakers, and low latency network? It seems like those factors alone would get most of the way there and the 3D aspect is just a bonus. Obviously I haven't used it in person but this was just a thought since most people are used to video calls on their small phone/laptop with poor lighting, mics, etc
    • abhv 5y ago
      NO WAY. It is impossible for me to explain how/why it works so well.
      • sneak 5y ago
        I am sure that the immersion of the experience is higher. My question (and perhaps that of GP) is: is this greater immersion actually beneficial to communication? I think this is cool tech, and valuable. I'm just not sure that it offers a communication benefit over well-lit, well-miced, wired, low latency, 8K videoconferencing. Maybe there's some 3D emotional perception face processing stuff that we have deep in our brains that can immensely benefit from this, but I'm skeptical. I think simply doing 4k or 8k low latency high quality videoconferencing might be a 90 or 95% solution without needing special cameras/displays.
        • throwaway3699 5y ago
          Being able to feel like another person in the room is enough for me to reconsider working from home. As of right now I strongly have a preference for in person, but I do acknowledge most people prefer commute and cost benefits over productivity. The state of video conferencing today is a poor one and I'm very excited for something that can change the industry like this.
          • sneak 5y ago
            I'm right there with you, and I use a 4k camera and a boom mic and headphones and wired ethernet to videoconference now: I have been regularly complaining about the low resolution and framerates of current videoconferencing systems (10-15fps, 720p, low bitrate - and that's the highest quality setting available!). If Google wanted to make me believe they care about videoconferencing quality, they'd have a 4k 60fps option that auto-enables in Meet if it detects everyone on the call is on wired gigabit with a 4k camera.
  • sleepybrett 5y ago
    Similar tech in the display of the nintendo 3ds?
  • rejectedandsad 5y ago
    That's very cool, but out of curiosity > project (he has a Phd Princeton Why is this part relevant? Was the PhD in light field technology?
  • soylentgraham 5y ago
    Is it lenticular, or something else?
  • draw_down 5y ago
    It does seem really cool but I don't see any reason to think they are sharing it with a larger audience.
  • imiric 5y ago
    It looks like they're doing photogrammetry in real time, which is mind boggling. I'm not familiar with this space, but building a 3D model, texturing it with live video, compressing and sending that over the internet, and doing it with minimal latency for it to be believable/enjoyable? Incredible technical achievement if that's the approach. Using state of the art tech, no doubt, and probably lots of ML magic to smooth the rendering. The 3D display is the icing on the cake, it must look amazing in person.
    • shahar2k 5y ago
      not that hard to do if you have actual depth sensing cameras, and even without those, something like the oculus quest 2 does that exact task (generate a rough 3d volume based on several 2d video feeds) you can see a neat example when you draw your guardian space, and move objects (and notice how it updates the 3d volume representation)
      • imiric 5y ago
        Good point, I haven't followed the latest VR advancements, that does sound neat. Still, Starline's approach is surely much more sophisticated (the hardware obviously has a lot to do with that, these are prototypes of a desk-sized machine vs a headset). The 3D model looks reasonably detailed, and the final render has very few artifacts. Making it all work over a WAN link with latencies critical for teleconferencing is also impressive.
      • Aeolun 5y ago
        Using Oculus Quest 2 had me just walking around my room in wonder about seeing straight through the headset for a bit.
      • rewq4321 5y ago
        The difficulty completely depends on the level of quality you're after. They're certainly working on cutting-edge-level quality, so it is likely no easy task. Someone else pointed out that they released a paper on related tech last year: https://augmentedperception.github.io/deepviewvideo/ https://augmentedperception.github.io/deepviewvideo/
  • Pxtl 5y ago
    I'm still not understanding how the 3D works... is it like the 3DS? Because that required you position your head in a very specific place.
    • Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
      The "New 3DS" introduced head tracking and no longer needed your head in a fixed position by the way.
  • speeder 5y ago
    I want to try this just to see what happens, if I will have again the feeling something is more real than reality. Because optometrists are illegal in my country (here only medics can decide what glasses you can use), currently I don't have stereoscopic vision, although my brain CAN do it, if I had the correct images sent to my eyes somehow. (one of my eyes muscles is slightly shorter than the other side thus the images on that eye are shifted unless I had an optometrist design me glasses with a prism). So when I watched Avatar, an actually well made 3D movie, it literally felt more real than reality, despite it being obvious fantasy with aliens, floating rocks and all that stuff. EDIT: for those wondering, I am from Brazil, here medical professionals often sue the shit out of anyone offering any service remotely similar to an optometrist, they are quite aggressive about it, some attempted to make even discussion of the subject illegal. And when I was trying to get the prism and asked around my medics about it, one of them went really ballistic, I honestly thought the guy was going to punch me. I believe the reason for that is that for many medics, designing glasses is their only source of income, a guaranteed one, since here is ALSO illegal to buy glasses without a medic desining them for you first, even if the new glasses are supposed to be identical to the old ones!
    • djrogers 5y ago
      Sounds like a great reason to do a little medical tourism once the present situation is under control.
    • thegginthesky 5y ago
      Shouldn't an ophthalmologist here in Brazil be able to diagnose you and give you a prescription for corrective lenses, or even perform corrective surgery? I'm asking in case I might need to look for one in the future.
      • ZeroClickOk 5y ago
        I'm from Brazil too, and my eye glasses are recommended by a optometrist. The only way an optometrist to work is being an ophthalmologist with specialization in "optometry". It is a sad reality from our bureaucratic government that don't give us freedom to innovate.
  • wpietri 5y ago
    The question for me is how much it matters after the novelty wears off. I count at least 5 waves of 3D technology starting in 1851 with the Brewster Stereoscope. Each time there's a surge of popularity driven by the legitimately amazing initial experience. And each time people slowly stop caring. People were incredibly excited about Avatar, and many thought it would change the movie industry. But how many people now go out of the way to see something in 3D?
    • suyash 5y ago
      Exactly, it's just a fancy FaceTime technology, I would be bored after few days. Tell me a problem that it solves.
      • imiric 5y ago
        > Tell me a problem that it solves. Replicating the experience of in-person communication much more closely than video and 2D displays will ever do. That's a noble research goal if nothing else, I don't get the skepticism. There are several reasons 3D content and previous generation displays didn't take off, but there's no reason to believe a revolutionary new approach and product couldn't change this (e.g. electric cars were invented in the 19th century and are only now becoming popular). AFAICT the real time photogrammetry they're using here along with the no-glasses 3D display is a major leap forward. If they can get it cheap and reliable enough to mass market, it would be a game changer. I certainly know what kind of display and teleconferencing software I want when the next pandemic hits, and it's not what we have now.
        • wpietri 5y ago
          > Replicating the experience of in-person communication much more closely That's not a problem people express much, at least not in ways where "3D" points to a solution. When I want to see people in person, it's not because of a lack of stereoscopy. I want to hug them, to break bread with them. > there's no reason to believe a revolutionary new approach and product couldn't change this There is indeed! In specific, the many times we have already had revolutionary new approaches and products that were met with great enthusiasm in the market for a few years. I'd add that the telephone was not only a very successful technology for a century, audio calls still remain very popular. (I'm not sure what your work calls are like these days, but quite a lot of people turn off video in mine.) The lesson I take from that is that people mainly self-generate the feeling of interpersonal connection, and they can do it with very little in the way of cues. To me that's another strong indication that no new 3D technology will make much of a difference.
  • XnoiVeX 5y ago
    Sony has it's own version of the light field display. https://youtu.be/KrLMnQM0_Ps https://youtu.be/KrLMnQM0_Ps
  • mywacaday 5y ago
    I have wondered in the past if a similar result could be achieved using a 3d headset with some tracking/cameras and removing the headset from the view through a real-time deep fake that could be achieved through a short scan before the call. Would this even be feasible?
    • purplecats 5y ago
      probably would have an uncanny valley effect
  • Aeolun 5y ago
    How does it do the light field if multiple people are behind the glass? They can’t really optimize it for every person individually right?
  • jbverschoor 5y ago
    I've seen 3d screens in Japan 20 years ago. TVs, ad displays, mobile phones. It works really well, and it's actually very simple technology. Never understood why that never took off.
    • colordrops 5y ago
      This is different. It's a light field display, so you can view things at different angles as you move around, rather than having to sit in a very exact position and only seeing one angle.
  • nipponese 5y ago
    Isn't it just the "Pepper's Ghost" technique? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper%27s_ghost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper%27s_ghost
    • nimchimpsky 5y ago
      huh ? how is it related to that in any way ?
    • rewq4321 5y ago
      No, this sends a different image to each eye. It's not actually a transparent piece of glass with an image on it[0] - I think they just try to make it seem as if it is a transparent pane you're looking through. The marketing for it is pretty terrible though, because I initially came away with the same impression as you. [0] See image here: https://www.engadget.com/google-project-starline-191228699.html https://www.engadget.com/google-project-starline-191228699.h...
  • 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
    Questions: How does this relate to advertising and the necessary surveillance to support it. Will this "product" be set up to phone home and "update" by default. Will the price be "free". Commercial viability. How much would someone pay for this.
    • crazygringo 5y ago
      Sheesh. Why the FUD? It would presumably work exactly the same way as Google's existing videoconferencing hardware: https://workspace.google.com/products/meet-hardware/ https://workspace.google.com/products/meet-hardware/ In other words, you pay market value for it, it doesn't include advertising, and Google is contractually obligated not to snoop on your content. Which is why even Google competitors use this hardware, because the legal and technological protections are strong enough they don't worry about Google stealing their IP.
  • sfifs 5y ago
    So in my company, I've used various avatar's of Cisco TelePresence systems over many years. The big commercial need it turns out isn't so much realism as it is flexibility to accommodate people dialing in from different systems - phones, laptops, different types of telepresence setups from small single room to big conference rooms or even telephone connections etc. Many years ago, we were all wowed by the life-size realism and had people come into offices for it . Nowadays these meetings have lots of people crammed in across multiple screens dialing in as they please and all the better for everyone :-)
  • supermatt 5y ago
    Over a decade ago I used a holographic video conferencing system that used kinect for depth mapping, it was very convincing. It would also reorient the display based on your head position. so you could look "around" the avatar. There are demos of binocular 3d conferencing done with a lenticular display (lookingglass), although those large displays are extortionately priced (1/4 of the size of this google one is $3000...) - keeping them out of the hands of most devs. No doubt google are doing the same, but can afford these larger displays. You can easily find examples (and research papers) by googling for the relevant terms. Google claiming they have invented a "new technology" just shits on all those folk who dont have the publicity/funding of google.
  • estaseuropano 5y ago
    Just very practically, is this a $xxxx.xx improvement over simple video chat with a large screen and simple camera? Will this even work without low-latency high-bandwidth connection up and down? It seems more like an art project than a tech usable in the coming decade.
  • niutech 5y ago
    Can you tell your friend at Google that their website weights whooping 89 MB, most of which are huge animated GIF-s? This is insane! Doesn't Google know about HTML5 video yet? https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/11/gif-to-video/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/11/gif-to-video/
• nynx 5y ago
  I wonder if this uses a microlens display.
• achow 5y ago
  If you watch the video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q13CishCKXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q13CishCKXY Interesting thing to note is that they don't show the participants touching the glass pane 'separating' them, whereas for that kind of situation it would be very very natural thing to do. I guess doing so (reaching towards the 'glass pane') would make the imagery distort/degrade real fast as you would start going out of camera's FoV, which that would break the magic.
  • sneak 5y ago
    A bit ironic that this promo video maxxes out in 1080p, despite YouTube supporting 4K and this tech pumping 8K+ res. There is so much more we can do in terms of quality and immersion that we're not doing simply because bandwidth and connectivity are so low-quality and overpriced at most of our leaf nodes in the USA.
• drusepth 5y ago
  I get similar vibes to demoing VR the first time. My first thought was, "My tech-illiterate dad would have his mind _blown_ by this." Unfortunately, even an already-set-up VR experience was too strange/unnatural for him so he never got to experience it. However, this looks easy/natural to use and set up and feels like it'd have a similar mind-blowing effect for many of the older generations, which I think is a good indicator of being revolutionary tech (assuming it can be made available/cheap enough for most people to try it out).
  • mhh__ 5y ago
    I got my Dad to play SUPERHOT VR for a bit, he liked it, but I suspect the "Shoot yourself in the head to start the demo" bit was possibly a bit on the nose considering he spent quite a few years manning suicide helplines.
  • wildpeaks 5y ago
    The "wow it's really 3D" effect without glasses is what people experience everytime I've shown Looking Glass to someone, glad to see devices with higher resolution are coming and more people in the market, end users will benefit from more concurrence to drive the quality up.
• aerovistae 5y ago
  This reminds me of the devices described in the short story "The Story of Your Life", which is the basis of the movie Arrival. Excellent, excellent story and very different from the movie, if anyone's into that kind of thing.
  • tomduncalf 5y ago
    Seconded, I’ve really enjoyed all of Ted Chiang’s books and wish he was more prolific as I’ve read them all! An excellent writer and I think his style would appeal to the HN crowd as it’s kind of sci-fi, kind of based in science, and many of his stories are quite thought provoking and unique. Also they’re all short stories so great if you struggle finding time to take on a whole book or whatever!
    • paxys 5y ago
      I recently read Exhalation, and was blown away by how engaging and thought provoking the stories were. Would highly recommend it to anyone with even a passing, high-level interest in sci-fi.
      • deleted 5y ago
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      • tomduncalf 5y ago
        Same here. I’m quite picky when it comes to sci-fi, a lot of it I don’t really like, but he nails a really unique sweet spot where sci-fi is just the framing device used for some beautiful stories. Might reread his books next actually! Edit: I’d love any recommendations of other authors people think of when discussing his books. Doesn’t necessarily have to be the same style but more just that level of quality and uniqueness.
        • shriphani 5y ago
          The first story in Exhalation is written in the style of the Arabian Nights (Thousand and One Nights). Get the unabridged, original translation by Richard Burton - it is some of the most beautiful literature ever written - comes in 16 volumes so there will be no shortage of reading material!
• encryptluks2 5y ago
  While cool for the top 5% wealthiest people, I'd be more interested in tech for the other 95% that will actually be affordable.
  • weird-eye-issue 5y ago
    Such an unnecessarily pessimistic comment. How do you think tech becomes affordable? It has to start somewhere and then we go from there...
  • dpratt71 5y ago
    What is an example of important technology that did not start as something only available to the affluent/connected?
    • varispeed 5y ago
      A wheel
    • wizzwizz4 5y ago
      Minecraft. Linux. (Really want to write GNU, but that's not true.)
      • dpratt71 5y ago
        Is it not the case that having access to a machine capable of running either Minecraft or Linux in the early days of each (if not now) means you are (or were) fairly affluent?
        • munk-a 5y ago
          It depends on what you mean by the early days of each - in the really early days of Linux (1992) computers were probably going to cost north of a few thousand dollars and the type of computer Linux was designed for (a multi-user system for dumb terminals) would cost tens of thousands of dollars. By the time linux became a thing more than a handful of people in any given state knew about you could probably run it on a machine costing somewhere around 300$. Minecraft has never been demanding resource wise, I'm sure early versions had serious performance issues but running it on a cheapo laptop has always been totally reasonable - it's quite accessible (it was written in java even!)
• machello13 5y ago
  Reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2prsYbV1TkM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2prsYbV1TkM from Silicon Valley. I imagine the real-world experience will be pretty similar for a long time.
  • LightG 5y ago
    Haha, thanks ... worth hanging on until the second half ...
  • lurkerasdfh8 5y ago
    Reminds? this is literally it! Also, microsoft did this a couple years ago, without fancy volumetric display, just face tracking on their expensive 8k(?) tv for meeting rooms, and it was a complete flop.
• Simulacra 5y ago
  That is really interesting but I can't shake the feeling of it being like visiting hours at the jail.
  • adrianmonk 5y ago
    Yeah, on a certain level it's frustrating if a technology can seem to bring far away to an arm's length away, but not actually any closer.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • AppleCandy 5y ago
    No, just needs some onlyfans optimization. Step aside VR, there's a new medium in town, revolutionary engagement if casters can pony up.
  • booleandilemma 5y ago
    Some fun backgrounds and filters will alleviate that feeling.
  • tyingq 5y ago
    Same. I suppose they kept the decor and backgrounds stark to showcase what it's doing. But it does have that feel, as-is. At least nobody was wearing orange :)
• helen___keller 5y ago
  It looks like magic, when I saw the video I briefly thought it was a joke (ha-ha, they're actually in the same room!). I wonder how much of the magic is software and how much is hardware? The video certainly plays up the software, but I've never used zoom or FaceTime in an 8k video call booth before, so I suppose I don't have a point of comparison.
  • dbbk 5y ago
    It's not just an 8K video call, it also has 3D depth.
    • pbhjpbhj 5y ago
      I'm not sure it's the parent's point (I suspect it is), but mine would be that it might be you get 80% of the "it's like they're there in the room" effect by having 8k; good lighting; well-separated, good quality, stereo sound; a purpose made space without distractions; etc.? If you've only had 480/720 on a small screen, with a mono microphone with poor lighting, lag, dropouts, then just fixing those things and making it 2k+ might be surprisingly good (ie will have an emotional impact due to the truer representation)?
• notyourday 5y ago
  Will be canceled within two years.
  • doodpants 5y ago
    Two years after general release; they need time to develop a dedicated user base to upset by its cancellation.
    • notyourday 5y ago
      True. No point in killing it before customers invest time and money into the product that Google was all in!
• riffic 5y ago
  HP did this at least 15 years ago with their "Halo" conferencing systems: https://www.networkworld.com/article/2258553/inside-the-halo-room.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2258553/inside-the-halo... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC4sNztp8dk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC4sNztp8dk
  • percentcer 5y ago
    Halo was just a big video screen. I worked at DW for six years, it was nice but it didn't feel like you were there in person.
  • LogicCowboy 5y ago
    HP's Halo conferencing system had several studio quality cameras that would change the video feed based on who was talking. There were also specially placed mics on the conference table to keep audio crisp. The video quality was impressive, however you had the same issues that you have with current web-cam based systems. Eye-contact was non-existent. While the camera placement was above the middle-top of the LCD screen, you'd never feel like the person was making eye-contact with you unless they looked directly at the camera. I had several team meetings in Halo rooms, and for the time, it was the next best thing to having a meeting in person. It also worked well for groups of 4 on each side of the link. From watching the video, Google's conferencing setup is creating a 3D rep of the people talking and adjusting rendered view based on where the participants are seated. This is blending AR with videoconferencing. It would be interesting to see how their conferencing system works with multiple-people on each side. I know the video had a mother and baby in one segment, however is the 3D rendering based on the eye-level of the main participants?
    • com2kid 5y ago
      > Eye-contact was non-existent. Potentially a solved problem, just fix it in post. :) https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-microsoft-finally-lets-you-make-eye-contact-on-video-calls-with-this-new-preview/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-microsoft-finally-l... I wonder how well it works, and how much latency (if any) it adds to the feed. I'm also sad it isn't rolled out more generally, a very strange feature to lock behind a small-ish volume hardware product.
• mrfusion 5y ago
  I’m confused what the 3d display screen is? I thought we didn’t have technology like that without glasses?
  • AdamTReineke 5y ago
    Appears similar to the tech in the Nintendo 3DS: lenses over the screen so each eye sees a different picture. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereoscopy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereoscopy
    • jayd16 5y ago
      Why does it appear similar to that tech other than you get a 3d image? As far as I can tell there's no info on the display other than it uses "Light field technology" which would make it different than the parallax barrier display on the 3DS.
      • gmueckl 5y ago
        The term light field technology is broad enough to cover lenticular arrays in displays. The 3DS had the major limitation that it only rendered two views. If you increase the resolution to be able to display more views for more viewing directions within a wider cone, you already have a light field display - simply because all these views combined form a sampled light field representation by definition. This is exactly the same as glassless 3d displays for multiple viewers of decades past. But advances in display pixel density and computing power apparently make the resulting illusion much more convincing these days.
        • jayd16 5y ago
          Isn't it clear glass and not a layer over a traditional display like the 3DS? Glasses would either actively time slice with shutters, or spectrum slice with passive filters on the lens and of course you need the glasses. How could any of those technologies be what is used here? E: Looking again, perhaps it could be some layer over a traditional screen. You see through some of the broadcasts but that could just be the digital far plane that shows through.
• helios_invictus 5y ago
  Doesn't look like these people are in a prison visit center at all.
• mrfusion 5y ago
  Much simpler idea but I think I’d get a good sense of being together to play table tennis over the quest with a friend. (Sadly none of my friends will buy a quest.)
  • bradneuberg 5y ago
    I agree I love my Quest, and the sense of presence is amazing. Can't wait until more of my friend social network has them so we can meet up and do things like table tennis.
• varispeed 5y ago
  It seems like this could be used in the future dystopian economy. Workers sleeping in little capsules next to a screen where they can choose to see their partner in another factory or AI driven escort. On a serious note likely everyone is going to have at least one at home at some point to use for work meetings, pairing or for home inspections by the government.
• allenu 5y ago
  Really cool execution. I wonder what the lag is like. I can imagine that's one thing that would break the illusion. I know with something like Zoom I've gotten used to managing the lag over time by taking turns with the other person. However, with the "live" feel of this, there could be an uncanny valley effect if the lag is subtle, but perceptible. Another thought: this is being presented as ongoing research. I wonder what the corporate thinking is in presenting it now when it's still being tried out. Does Google want capitalize on remote meetings while it's still hot? If the pandemic wanes and we have more in-person meetings, this might not make as big a splash. I remember when I worked at Microsoft, I often noticed research announcements we'd make in public often wouldn't translate to actual product, so I got a bit jaded on any cool new thing that was announced without a product timeline.
  • jayd16 5y ago
    Google has plenty of dark fiber. I'm sure they could get something close to land line levels of lag for an office to office connection.
  • skybrian 5y ago
    The longer the project exists and the more people there are who get to try it, the more likely it is to leak. To speculate, here are some reasons why keeping it secret longer might be hard: - They're going to do wider testing within Google. - They're going to start bringing outside testers in to try it. - They're going to start working with manufacturers. - Some newspaper got wind of it and is about to publish a story. (I think this happened with driverless cars?) Apple is better at keeping secrets, and even they leak. Also, it's nice for the people working on it when they no longer have to keep what they do a secret. Edit: although, in this case, the timing mostly has to do with Google I/O starting today.
  • xnx 5y ago
    It's advantageous to announce when you have a good working prototype so that when a competitor (e.g. Apple) announces something similar, the world is less impressed/amazed.
    • 5y ago
• frakkingcylons 5y ago
  I would pay a lot of money if this was commercially available. Very impressive
• ricopags 5y ago
  Looks like tonari[0] will have some heavy competition sooner than expected. This seems to have a lot more attention paid to the sensation of depth than the tonari offering. Could see this being popular at high end senior care facilities. [0]https://tonari.no https://tonari.no
  • chewxy 5y ago
    At Atlassian, they built a Portal inspired portal that connects the Sydney and SF office during one hackathon. Basically a camera behind a 2way mirror (and decorated with blue/orange LEDs in an oval frame). Tonari looks a lot more like that than Starline.
• crooked-v 5y ago
  This is a really interesting project, and I wonder how long until Google unceremoniously cancels it and drops support for anyone who's bought into it.
  • barbazoo 5y ago
    And have they announced yet how they're planning to invade my privacy with this?
    • goldenchrome 5y ago
      Well, they'll have extensive 3D data about your body and your house.
  • acdha 5y ago
    This is getting downvoted but it really is a valid concern. Google’s been losing users on each discontinuation and only the most pro-Google techies I know are still jumping in to something new, especially given the trend towards one cool feature and a bunch of “QA is boring” stuff which will take a year to get fixed. Given their past reputation, it’s really cautionary as a shareholder to hear C-level questions about services like GCP questioning the risks of not going with AWS/Azure and getting stranded. That’s a big deal for anything which requires hardware you wouldn’t otherwise own. Once you hear “custom-built hardware and highly specialized equipment” that sounds like something you really want a commitment to not just begrudgingly patch but to continue to seriously invest in the product.
    • jsnell 5y ago
      It's getting downvoted because it is repetitive, with thousands of effectively identical copies being posted on HN yearly. It is not insightful. It is not clever. It's not reacting to the story, except for lazy pattern matching. It is just a tired meme that's been flogged all the way down to the bone by now. (It's probably also not true, when compared to Google's peers. Amazon and Microsoft similarly throw a bunch of stuff on the wall, and unceremoniously kill the failures, but neither their launches nor cancellations get this reaction.)
• hirundo 5y ago
  My dad used to tell a story about my grandfather's first experience with television in the late forties. There was a buxom woman on the screen, and he walked up to it, trying to look down her cleavage. It didn't work. Does Starline give you a different view when you change your perspective? It looks like it does to some extent. If so, it might work before long, but grandpa died about fifty years too soon for it.
  • yakkityyak 5y ago
    That would really take it to the next level if it had that feature, even with very few degrees of freedom. The (New) Nintendo 3DS has head tracking, but it doesn't change your perspective into the view port, which gives a very dizzying effect when you deliberately test the feature. I would imagine its possible to extrapolate perspective if they had an array (N > 2) of cameras. This is super cool tech, and can't wait to see an array of these installed in the secret undisclosed board rooms for the illuminati.
  • sneak 5y ago
    My understanding of the existing tech that's out (3d displays) is that it allows for such on the X axis (different view per-eye) but not on the Y, so a scenario such as you described (looking downwards) might still remain sci-fi for the moment. Perhaps this does something entirely new/novel with display tech but there's nothing to suggest that at the moment.
  • blastro 5y ago
    Great story re: your grandfather. Thanks for sharing.
  • agumonkey 5y ago
    maternal grandfather had trouble adjusting to tv too, he never stopped greeting female tv hosts on screen
  • bellyfullofbac 5y ago
    On the topic of buxom women, my first thought about this tech was, it'll be the next frontier for OnlyFans/porn accounts on Snapchat. Before you laugh or be prude, porn content was what made VHS and BluRay succeed (or are these urban legends?) and they were pioneers in stuff like online video streaming.
• asim 5y ago
  This is actually groundbreaking technology. If this gets widely deployed and then evolves we're looking at telepresence as the next step in ambient computing. When the technology fades into the background that's when you know things are going to be remarkably different. This is quite honestly going to be as close to teleportation as we get.
  • Pxtl 5y ago
    If it got widely deployed onto infrastructure not owned by Google, real-world internet conditions would ruin it with latency and lag-spikes.
  • sammalloy 5y ago
    Asim, are you familiar with how Stephen Baxter portrayed the use of telepresence in his science fiction novels? If not, check it out. But if you are, please explain it to me! It always confused the hell out of me.
• deleted 5y ago
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• breakingcups 5y ago
  It's interesting to see the compression artifacts affecting hair specifically. I guess we're going to get used to different kinds of compression artifacts in the coming years because we're switching to spatial information being transmitted as opposed to just pixels. Hair is so much harder to get right than a face.
• TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  I feel like this is the kind of thing I'm going to have to experience in person to appreciate. The video just isn't conveying anything meaningful to me. Still, the concept is exciting, and if the execution is there, it'll be one of the most important leaps in communications technology in decades. And I'm looking forward to a company named something like InstaPresence (TM) applying filters and making us all photorealistic cat people.
• fungiblecog 5y ago
  Am I the only one that thinks one-on-one video is already fine, and what we actually need is to improve the experience so that a group of people feel like they're meeting in the same place?
  • piyh 5y ago
    The inexorable march of technology will continue, curmudgeon or not. There's no reason this approach won't scale to groups or larger areas.
• williesleg 5y ago
  Why is it the white guys build it but aren't in the video using it? So sick of this bullshit.
• airstrike 5y ago
  This, my friends, is how business travel becomes nearly irrelevant. This is a beautifully executed idea and if the demos live up to expectation the hype may even be warranted. But on a much more fundamental level (i.e. fancy 3D imaging and spatial audio aside), this also possibly suggests people would benefit from dedicated videoconferencing hardware. TVs and telephones do one thing really well (or at least historically they did), which is why even my legally blind grandpa could call his friends or watch^W listen to the news. There's a market for having a plug-and-play videophone now that we have the software to go inside it. What are Zoom, Facebook or Apple waiting for?
  • adam 5y ago
    I immediately thought of business travel as well. Project us all in to a virtual conference room and give us a suite of collaboration tools to use while we're all there. The only thing missing is the after meeting drinks and dinner, but there will inevitably be services to put us all in a restaurant/bar environment, pipe in some bar white noise, have food sent from a local restaurant, etc. for an "in-person" virtual happy hour...
    • unethical_ban 5y ago
      That "the only thing missing" is the main reason to go to many conferences. A lot of people (those with less social desire/social skills) seem to resent it, but it is true: Networking and casual technical conversations that happen afterhours are the draw for many technical conferences. Talks can be good, and occasionally there are well-constructed lab sandboxes. But mostly, it's going and speed-dating with peers and sales teams to talk about your needs and architecture, and building a good web of contacts. I also believe fully remote technical/collaboration work, without any periodic physical meetups, will be awful for a lot of people. Sure, those who bought into it pre-pandemic prefer it, and that's fine. But I really think there is concern to be had for the fraying of social bonds and teamwork that can be done, even (or especially) with people you have a tough time working with.
      • ghaff 5y ago
• LightG 5y ago
  When can I try this on my phone? Imagine gaming on this. I assume the porn industry will be early adopters (sorry, it's probably true).
  • Jach 5y ago
    Inferior to VR for gaming or pron.
• leokennis 5y ago
  My first thought: in 2030 when I’m calling grandma with this, I will first need to accept cookies, then accept the new Google privacy policy, then sign in to my Google account, then watch 2 20-second long pre roll ads.
  • booleandilemma 5y ago
    Google will have definitely discontinued this project by then of course :)
  • silentsea90 5y ago
    We're witnessing magical tech and innovation, and here we are back to making fun of signing in, ads and cynicism about Google shutting down projects.
    • meibo 5y ago
      Especially because most of Google's productivity apps don't even have ads. I think it's just Gmail on mobile at the moment.
      • hu3 5y ago
        I thought Gmail "read" my emails to finetune ads but today it told me they don't: https://i.imgur.com/SHSOSJ7.png https://i.imgur.com/SHSOSJ7.png
    • leokennis 5y ago
      We're witnessing a magical tech demo here. If Google actually releases it and hinder it with ads, sign in walls etc., it's not magical anymore. If they then cancel it two years later, it doesn't even exist anymore. We can pretend that this will be Google's magical fairytale product that will not be impacted by the above, but who are we kidding?
• vicary 5y ago
  That looks amazing
• draw_down 5y ago
  Pretty cool! Seems about as real as a concept car, though.
• annoyingnoob 5y ago
  Looks like an electronic prison visit.
  • spurgu 5y ago
    I.e. ecstatic since you're generally not allowed to see people.
  • edderly 5y ago
    Bingo. Video conferencing meets the uncanny valley.
• spurgu 5y ago
  Thought: This could bring back phone booths. If this tech turns out to be too expensive (for normal people) we could still use it on a pay-per-use basis, like with a "video conferencing booth". You'd schedule your call and reserve a local booth for both participants through an app. And most companies should be able to afford having one of these in the office.
  • agumonkey 5y ago
    Totally unrelated but on the radio there was a company talking about making internet pods to be able to communicate without being in the open like in starbucks. It seems we're seeing a second coming of distributed private comms.
  • tiagod 5y ago
    I agree with you, I'm also imagining these in public libraries, retirement homes, small village community centres. I just hope we don't end up with a bunch of incompatible, proprietary appliances that can't talk to each other.
  • paxys 5y ago
    It would have to be really futuristic to convince people to coordinate timings, reserve a slot, pay and drive to some location for a video call. FaceTime/WhatsApp are still good enough for most. The office use case is probably more realistic, but some other related products (Surface Hub, Jamboard) haven't become as ubiquitous as originally imagined.
    • bitcoinmoney 5y ago
      Remote job interviews.
      • wraptile 5y ago
        No way anyone cares about visual detail for job interviews.
  • dgudkov 5y ago
• Pxtl 5y ago
  This is cool as hell, but I have to say I feel like we're solving top-level problems when most consumers don't even seem to be getting solutions to the most basic pain-points. For me, the problem with video-calling isn't the image-quality. It's all the much more mundane technological problems - high latency, lag-spikes caused by bad ISPs, failed noise-cancellation for people who don't use headsets for audio, bad wifi routers cutting out, etc. First thing I did when I realized we were going to be WFH long-term was buy myself a $100 gaming headset. Next thing I did was get all my home computer stations wired with Cat 6. That stuff is far more fundamental and far less interesting than 3D telepresence, but it's the real unsexy problem that so many people are suffering through this pandemic. Even simple things like latency make simple, natural reactions agonizing. Talkcover and crosstalk is incessent and I've developed a filthy habit of just talking over people because otherwise it's a solid 20 seconds of "you go no you go" caused by awful latency. I've had to defuse angry reactions by co-workers who feel they're being interrupted by other co-workers and explain to them that the latency makes interruptions feel worse than they are. I've tried to push friends to join me on my private Mumble server where the latency is near-nil and the call-quality is excellent, but there's always one person who doesn't have a working headset and wants to just use a laptop or tablet mic with no feedback-cancelling that destroys the conversation through echos (plus Mumble's auth system is needlessly bewildering). Then with video, problems are similar but less impactful - cheap cameras, poor lighting, compression artifacts, poor sync with the audio, etc. And it's infuriating because every person has a wonderfully powerful camera in their pocket right now - and there's software to connect them but it's just too tricky for most people. Good on Google for taking an interest in the subject, but I feel like they're decorating the apex of the technological pyramid while most people are pushing stones around at the bottom.
  • crazygringo 5y ago
    Most of that Google can't do anything about, because it's not under their control. And it's really a question of money. If you want to fix all those mundane problems you describe, literally every one can be addressed by renting a better pipe and buying and setting up better equipment. This Google product is clearly designed for high-end offices that already have all of those things under control.
• the_gipsy 5y ago
  Can't wait to see ads in 3d
• ProAm 5y ago
  Id just be really uncomfortable with google monitoring, recording and analyzing my personal communications to sell me ads or worse later. Everything google does now feels.... invasive for lack of a better word. This is something Id like to see from Apple, and Im not an Apple fan at all.
  • silentsea90 5y ago
    Do you pay for youtube?
    • ProAm 5y ago
      I don't publish content on YouTube, but YouTube is also not intimate communication with friends and family.
  • throwaway3699 5y ago
    > Google Cloud (which offers Meet) doesn't use customer data for advertising. Google Cloud doesn't sell customer data to third parties. https://support.google.com/meet/answer/9852160?hl=en-GB#zippy=%2Cprivacy-and-transparency https://support.google.com/meet/answer/9852160?hl=en-GB#zipp... Why would this be any different?
    • intricatedetail 5y ago
      How can you prove they don't do that?
    • ProAm 5y ago
      I do not trust what comes out of Google PR vs what their engineers do behind the scenes. They've been caught in the past doing nefarious things or just a general disconnect/interpretation between what they say and what they do. Because they are an advertising company I always assume that takes priority with direction.
  • hu3 5y ago
    I was surprised today when I opened Gmail and it displayed this: https://i.imgur.com/SHSOSJ7.png https://i.imgur.com/SHSOSJ7.png I was ok with Gmail scanning my emails to finetune targeted advertisement. But they don't do that, which is a nice surprise.
• nemonemo 5y ago
  I think another good use case for this sort of hardware/service could be for youtubers/streamers/performers who want to provide immersive interaction to the viewers. If I am a fan of a singer, I'd definitely pay for an opportunity to watch the person singing right in front of me, instead of going to the concerts where I watch them singing miles away.
• beefman 5y ago
  Why does the copy on this page read like something out of dystopian novel?
• rmccue 5y ago
  The capture and compression part might be related to this Google Research: https://augmentedperception.github.io/deepviewvideo/ https://augmentedperception.github.io/deepviewvideo/ Interview about the SIGGRAPH paper here: https://blog.siggraph.org/2020/08/how-google-is-making-streamable-light-field-video-a-reality.html/ https://blog.siggraph.org/2020/08/how-google-is-making-strea...
• asenna 5y ago
  On a related note, I wanted to share my amazing experience with a similar but lo-fi tech. My mom and dad for the past 2-3 years have mostly lived in two separate countries (due to work reasons) and I could tell they miss each other quite a bit. I got both of them an Echo Show 10" device each and set it up for them. I don't think I can explain how our lives have changed for the better, just based on this simple piece of tech. The Echo Show is now pretty much constantly on video call for 14-16 hours a day in the living room of both houses and it has become an extension of the one another; a window into the other house. The audio and mics are good enough that at times you genuinely forget the other person is not in the same room. This has truly helped them, especially during Covid times. It's actually good enough that my parents have their morning tea together practically almost the same way they used to when they were physically together. They've told me multiple times "I don't know how we could've lived without this Alexa thing". If Google can eventually get the prices down to reasonable levels, I really think people would be shocked at how fast this thing becomes part of our daily lives.
  • pinko 5y ago
    I can echo (no pun intended) this experience with the Echo Show, but I would love something much bigger and higher-def. My family is separated long-distance, and I would pay big money for a higher-def "window to another home" product.
    • deadfire55 5y ago
      Facebook has a 15.6" version of this called Portal Plus. I can't speak to the quality/value of it.
      • retreatguru 5y ago
        We tried Portal Plus at work to bring our two remote workers closer to the local office but it never really caught on in the office setting. The quality and tech was quite good though. Fb login required of course which was a minor nuisance.
      • CountHackulus 5y ago
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• agumonkey 5y ago
  google reinvents the uncanny valley ? I thought it was some stereographic encoding on layered displays but the second they mentioned 3d mapped videos I started to see pixar like characters. Very odd.
• d3ntb3ev1l 5y ago
  The ads will be amazing
• homedepotdave 5y ago
  The porn industry is about to be reinvented
  • oars 5y ago
    This is a game changer. Much better than VR/AR.
  • dzhiurgis 5y ago
    Indeed. Business needs screen sharing, screen annotation and audio (Slack covers 99% of this). Home users are relatively happy with what they have already (although no 4K streaming yet and cameras in laptops are kinda tragic). That leaves porn.
  • llsf 5y ago
    Yup, porn is definitely adopt it as soon as it makes economical sense. Especially, if this is pre-recorded and only sent for viewing (so no need too much bandwidth on upload side). I guess it would come down to the hardware and how much it costs.
  • megous 5y ago
    More like cam industry...
• drumhead 5y ago
  Nice promotion project, I wonder how long it'll last.
• jonas21 5y ago
  There's a bit more detail in this Wired article (though it's still quite vague): https://www.wired.com/story/google-project-starline/ https://www.wired.com/story/google-project-starline/ > What I’m actually looking at is a 65-inch light field display. The Project Starline booths are equipped with more than a dozen different depth sensors and cameras. (Google is cagey when I ask for specifics on the equipment.) These sensors capture photo-realistic, three-dimensional imagery; the system then compresses and transmits the data to each light field display, on both ends of the video conversation, with seemingly little latency. > All of the data is being transmitted over WebRTC... What Google claims is unique is the compression techniques it has developed that allow it to synchronously stream this 3D video bidirectionally.
  • randompwd 5y ago
    > I met with three separate Googlers in Project Starline (all of them men) Well, at least we know that they weren't all white men; because if they were, this writer would sure have let us know about this very irrelevant information.
• apinstein 5y ago
  If you want to get a sense of what this "feels" like and you have 6DoF VR, try a VR 180 video. I've not experienced the Google Starline project, but I can tell you that when I saw some of the really well-produced VR180 videos it was so realistic I felt I was invading someone's privacy. Of course this won't be the interactive feeling but it was pretty mind blowing to "feel" how intimate real 3d telepresence could be. They have some demo's here: https://arvr.google.com/vr180/ https://arvr.google.com/vr180/
• ashekara 5y ago
  So cool. Anyone have more information about tonari (https://tonari.no/ https://tonari.no/)? They were/are working on solving this “feel like you’re there” problem.
  • bschwindHN 5y ago
    I work there currently, we still exist! We actually just published a blog post last week about how we use tonari internally: https://blog.tonari.no/how-tonari-uses-tonari https://blog.tonari.no/how-tonari-uses-tonari
• vbsteven 5y ago
  There’s a funeral scene in Upload (on Prime Video) that does something like this. It felt like a window into another room and I loved that concept. It looks like the tech for actually doing this is closer than I thought. Exciting!
• sammalloy 5y ago
  The biggest selling point of this technology is its ability to reduce business travel and cut down on carbon emissions.
• paxys 5y ago
  The biggest barrier to virtual healthcare today is that patients find it hard to connect with and trust doctors over a screen. This seems like a perfect product fit, especially among older people.
  • homedepotdave 5y ago
    Is there evidence of this? This is not what I would guess the greatest barrier is to virtual healthcare
• xwdv 5y ago
  Wow, will be great to make recordings of people that you can sit and watch long after they're deceased. Maybe with some deep fakery even create AI versions that can respond to conversation.
• ilaksh 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereoscopy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereoscopy Which type of autostereoscopy is it?
• pc2g4d 5y ago
  Make an entire wall out of this, now you are virtually colocated.
• whymauri 5y ago
  please don't get google glass'd
• eamon_cas 5y ago
  Reminds me of Teliris (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teliris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teliris) which I got to demo 15 years ago. That product ran on dark fiber with special hardware to simulate two sides of a conference table. Really uncanny and unsettling etiquette-wise. One-on-one feels better all around.
• billiam 5y ago
  I am sure it is stunning and beyond anything most people have ever experienced, but will it be worth $$ to have a beautifully lit version of visiting someone in prison? It is still not human contact, I don't think we can fool the brain into not missing that.
• shannifin 5y ago
  While it looks exciting, I'm also interested in the 3D display's eventual potential for movies and games...
• difosfor 5y ago
  I'm really curious about the 3D video compression codec; besides this, imagine what that could mean for 3D VR streaming!
• 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  Why does Google continue to try to produce new products? We all know they will never become reality, or if they do, they'll stop existing soon after they're open to the public. They're now just a regretware company.
• bscphil 5y ago
  Feels like the future of this will be using AI approaches to simulate dead loved ones. I don't think that's a dystopian outcome, there are a lot of good aspects to it as well, even if we don't know the full ramifications.
• thepasswordis 5y ago
  Am I the only one horrified by this? The second photo of the person sitting in a booth looks like a set piece from some cautionary science fiction movie.
  • kossTKR 5y ago
    No, the whole setup looks dystopian to me. The presentation too knowing Google. Looks like a prison. People are already depressed as hell from the lack of touch, real family, community and friends in modern society. That said, of course this tech could have its uses, but mediated by the largest corporations on Earth that collect, sell and mediate everything about you and your friends? No thanks!
    • dmux 5y ago
      I can only imagine how unnerving it would be to hit a spike in latency or something and be shaken from your "suspension of disbelief" while your loved one glitches out and falls into uncanny valley territory.
• kaonwarb 5y ago
  I would love to try this - and use it for calls with family, etc. I’m skeptical on its impact on the in-person vs. remote debate for work. What really distinguishes in-person for me is the potential for informality. Bump into somebody, have a chat, walk over to a colleague’s desk for 5 minutes, decide to go on a walk for a 1x1 instead of sit in a room. This doesn’t do anything for any of that. In fact, it arguably increases formality. Understood that many folks are not interested in those in-person artifacts - sharing what I see as key distinctions which aren’t in the solution space of Starline.
• qmmmur 5y ago
  I feel like video calling is not great because you lose that depth which is natural to human communication. That said, I work in field focused on digital audio and sound and so all my colleagues have professional microphones and headphones which makes up 90% of that difference immediately.
• georgewfraser 5y ago
  I have always wanted to try setting up a low-tech version of this, where instead of using a light-field display, you assume that you have only one viewer and you simply render the correct point of view on the screen. This is the same technique used to shoot The Mandalorian [1], but in this case we're only trying to make a "pane of glass" so an ordinary high-res TV will do. With both participants positioned correctly, you will get correct accommodation, vergence, and parallax depth cues---only stereopsis is missing, and stereopsis is much less important than people think. 1/3 of people don't even have good stereo vision! [2] As long as you're willing to give up stereopsis, and you have only 1 viewer on each side, I think you could accomplish this type of immersive telepresence with an ordinary TV + software. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufp8weYYDE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufp8weYYDE8 [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4934608/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4934608/
• jaza 5y ago
  There I was, reading the intro blurb, thinking yay, we've finally built a holodeck. But alas, reading further down, just the same old flat screen, with slightly better spatial trickery than what we've already had for a while now. Computer, end program.
• busymom0 5y ago
  Is it just me or does this pic used in the header article look quite depressing? It makes me feel like talking to someone in prison: https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/images/Blog_HERO.max-1000x1000.png https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ima...
• netik 5y ago
  This technology is unreal, there is a deep-dive here: https://creativity.arch.tamu.edu/_common/FoVI3D_DeepDrive.pdf https://creativity.arch.tamu.edu/_common/FoVI3D_DeepDrive.pd...
• wbsun 5y ago
  Reminded me of this paper on SigGraph 2007: https://ict.usc.edu/pubs/An%20Interactive%20360%20Light%20Field%20Display.pdf https://ict.usc.edu/pubs/An%20Interactive%20360%20Light%20Fi..., video: https://youtu.be/8gvPS1m40gw https://youtu.be/8gvPS1m40gw
• rexreed 5y ago
  Side note - why does it feel like so many of Google's products, and especially their most core offerings are in a state of ongoing decay? Search is getting worse. Maps today is worse than maps 10 years ago. Even their Google home assistants, YouTube, Gmail, and other products just seem to be steadily creeping into more annoyances and less usability. There was a time I felt that Google's search was head and shoulders above anyone else's and when I reluctantly used DDG I felt I was compromising some aspect of search value for privacy value. But now when I use Google search I'm bombarded with ads, find I can't trust search results, and even copying search links results in a mess of Google redirect. What is happening to the core Google products or am I a curmudgeon for believing that the Internet was at its most functional and user-friendly best circa 2008?
  • Mangalor 5y ago
    To be fair, you would not want to be confronted with the reality of these products 10 years ago, there's been a million bug fixes that have been done since then. But I agree on Search, it's almost like they sabotaged it.
    • a1371 5y ago
      The search too. Wikipedia articles and useful covid graphs. Excellent context inference. The assistant is surprisingly powerful when I ask engineering questions (what's the coefficient for this when that).
  • mcbutterbunz 5y ago
    I would wager a guess that its due to lack of competition. Apple Maps only works on iOS. DDG is great but the search results aren’t. Does YouTube even have a competitor? I don’t think you’re a curmudgeon at all. Circa 2008, Google was innovating in a lot of different areas that were very valuable to the average user. The ROI on these services has gone way down.
    • kjakm 5y ago
      NB: Apple Maps also has a dedicated Mac app.
• craigc 5y ago
  The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
• rdtwo 5y ago
  Google is bringing back the phone both! In 3D pretty cool
• crossroadsguy 5y ago
  The two things that stayed with me after reading this and feeling excited for a very brief period were: 1. Google shutting it down after sometime out of the blue. Just like that. 2. Google needing nothing less than a Gmail account always logged-in and no choice about it.
• rajacombinator 5y ago
  So what’s the even moneyline on Google projects like this? 9 months?
• Judgmentality 5y ago
  I can just imagine how crazy this would make my dog. I think the technology is amazing, I'm just imagining how much this will confuse animals.
• thomasfl 5y ago
  Now make that person in front of you a virtual 3d rendered artificial person. Looking forward to be talking to a virtual Albert Einstein for real, sorta.
• crazygringo 5y ago
  Does anyone have a clue how the light field display works? Someone suggested this is the tech: https://lookingglassfactory.com/tech https://lookingglassfactory.com/tech But it still has no explanation of what the "proprietary light field technology" is. How do you get each pixel to show up as a different color with 45-100 separate angles? I had no idea this actually existed in production!
  • adrianmonk 5y ago
    I was curious too and found this slide deck: http://creativity.arch.tamu.edu/_common/FoVI3D_DeepDrive.pdf http://creativity.arch.tamu.edu/_common/FoVI3D_DeepDrive.pdf The explanation of how it works begins on p. 13. It seems to basically just have a huge number of very dense pixels, and in front it has some tiny lenses that direct each pixel at a different angle. Presumably there's a maximum distance you can view from because the further you get away from the display, the smaller the angle between your eyes. I would guess it's no coincidence that Google has set it up as a booth with a back wall that would ensure you keep close enough: https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/images/Booth_Blog.max-1000x1000.png https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ima...
  • curtisf 5y ago
    I've been very curious about this too. I believe there are two basic approaches. The first is "lenticular lenses" -- the same technology used to make those shiny postcards that change depending on what angle you tilt them at. Here's a site with an example GIF and kinda explains how it works: https://setosa.io/blog/2014/07/07/lenticular/ https://setosa.io/blog/2014/07/07/lenticular/ Normally, the lenticular lens is glued directly onto a printed sheet of paper, but you can instead glue it onto a _screen_, which lets you change the pixels underneath. There are a lot of challenges here; for example, the pixels are usually located a bit behind the glass, so the standard lenses used for printing won't focus perfectly on a screen. There's also another, simpler approach called "parallax barrier". This is what the 3DS used. Instead of using lenses to bend light, it _blocks_ the light coming out of certain pixels at certain angles. It's basically just an opaque sheet with periodic slits (the 3DS uses an LCD, so that 3D can be turned off by becoming transparent). Before I found a video of someone making one themselves using an iPhone and transparency sheets, but I can't find it at the moment... 3DS parallax barrier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-LzRT7Bvc0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-LzRT7Bvc0 Diagram from Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_barrier#/media/File:Parallax_barrier_vs_lenticular_screen.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_barrier#/media/File:P... A big disadvantage of parallax-barrier is that you end up blocking a lot of the screen, making the image darker. Supposedly you can combine the two approaches to reduce the darkness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yetX2C3AdCI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yetX2C3AdCI There are probably even more tricks involved, and this is all a lot easier-said-than-done. Here's a project that uses an LCD to make a dynamic parallax-barrier, that increases brightness by skipping the barriers wherever they don't matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrRnURU1W3E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrRnURU1W3E Tangent: There's also been some attempts to do _the reverse_, and use distorted lenses in front of a camera to recover a 3D scene using only a single camera: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3072959.3073589 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3072959.3073589 (link has a SIGGRAPH talk recorded which shows example results)
• gregcoombe 5y ago
  It's the office of the future! https://www.cs.unc.edu/Research/stc/ https://www.cs.unc.edu/Research/stc/. The challenge in 2000 was that bandwidth and 3d reconstruction needed several leaps forward in quality.
• nothingreallyma 5y ago
  Amusingly the video doesn’t load for me... chrome browser, YouTube video, etc... just sits and spins
  • grogenaut 5y ago
    youtube is having an outage
• Animats 5y ago
  This is a lot like Winscape, from 2012.[1] That's a display hooked to a Kinect head tracking system, so, as you move, the display is adjusted for your point of view. Winscape just used it as a window to the outside world. Same concept as VR headgear, without the headgear. The illusion only works for one viewer at a time, because the image is POV-dependent. Google is apparently using this with a 3D TV. Can you still get those? The main problem with doing this now is getting all the retro technology you need - a 3D TV and the good Kinect. Any good current GPU should be enough engine for this. [1] https://youtu.be/V2hxaijuZ6w https://youtu.be/V2hxaijuZ6w
• isaacimagine 5y ago
  This conceptually seems pretty similar to what Tonari [7] is doing, but there are some technological differences between the two. Just interesting, that's all. 7: https://tonari.no https://tonari.no
• joelkesler 5y ago
  This looks really cool. Exciting to see how this plays out in the future. Does anyone know if the display is similar to the display in the Looking Glass 8K holographic light field display? https://lookingglassfactory.com/8k https://lookingglassfactory.com/8k
• BlueYoshi 5y ago
  Is the technology used here for "tricking" the brain to simulate 3D the same as what Nintendo was using in the 3DS? If so, it carries a risk of developmental damage for the eyesight of children under 6, so as much as this might be cool they really shouldn't be showing kids using it, especially not babies.
• KETpXDDzR 5y ago
  Sounds like a solution that a regular consumer will never afford to use. I see the usual bay area behavior: Cool tech for rich people.
• jraph 5y ago
  A bit off-topic, but I couldn't help thinking about Tantacrul's video, Corporate Music - How to Compose with no Soul [1] when watching the video on this post. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIxY_Y9TGWI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIxY_Y9TGWI
• hyko 5y ago
  This is so cool. I’d buy it.
• fchu 5y ago
  Meanwhile Google Meet is still horrendous compared to Zoom, despite me and my coworker both having gigabit internet... Don't get me wrong, this is cool, but a research project becomes really cool when it gets well executed
• andyxor 5y ago
  that.. looks a bit like prison visit I hope they don't start using this for "whiteboard" interviews, would be super stressful to be interrogated from behind a mirror with nowhere to go
• sizzle 5y ago
  So are they going to use NLP to parse your conversions and build a knowledge graph of all your topics of interest to later run targeted advertising that is shockingly accurate and manipulates you to waste money purchasing random products you really didn’t need to waste money on right now?
  • CyanBird 5y ago
    They already do that through Google analytics and they already have dark profiles on basically anyone on earth that has touched their products, let alone making accounts So yeah...
  • sizzle 5y ago
    Conversations*
• nprateem 5y ago
  I wish they'd pump their money and brainpower into trying to reverse climate change instead of an incremental improvement to chat like this
• mNovak 5y ago
  Everyone's latching onto the 3D part, but if some version of this just lets us have our Zoom calls without the looking at camera/looking at screen, impossible to make eye contact thing, that'd be a step forward.
• fab1an 5y ago
  Hmmm. Personally, I would much rather have a lofi hologram that is capable of moving around, as much as I lack technical implementation specificity here :) Starline seems amazing, but there's a black mirror quality to the ultra pristine resolution.
• domano 5y ago
  Oh wow, totally reminds me of the Solarians in Asimovs "The Naked Sun" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Sun#Physical_distancing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Sun#Physical_distanc... Reading this shortly before the pandemic spread gave me a really strange perspective on the whole remote working boom.
• LeCow 5y ago
  Google Glass flop. Calling it now.
• sireat 5y ago
  "The receptionist’s phrase had prepared her for the only kind of link she knew, a simstim signal routed via Bell Europa. She’d assumed she’d wear a helmet studded with dermatrodes, that Virek would use a passive viewer as a human camera. But Virek’s wealth was on another scale of magnitude entirely. As her fingers closed around the cool brass knob, it seemed to squirm, sliding along a touch spectrum of texture and temperature in the first second of contact. Then it became metal again, green-painted iron, sweeping out and down, along a line of perspective, an old railing she grasped now in wonder."
• dontwannabe 5y ago
  How is this different from a high resolution screen?
  • presentation 5y ago
    Pretty sure it makes a 3d model of the scene and then if you move around the perspective changes as well, since the screen can show different images based on the angle you look at it. you can see a bit of this in the video when the camera moves around.
    • dontwannabe 5y ago
      Does it track eyes to change the perspective? Since the image is in 2d, i can not think of any other way?
• Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  Things like this make me feel more and more disassociated with science fiction TV shows / films. I'm sure they intentionally don't make communications too good, because then - with tech like this - people would go "lame, that's just the other actor in a box behind a glass pane", instead of "oo that is cool sci fi technology". I mean we used to marvel at things like Star Trek, but nowadays a smartphone is miles ahead of a lot of "day to day" things they showed in there. Foldable screens are coming too, and now this. I mean I don't believe this thing will be commonplace at all in the near future, but it's still cool. I think it'll be integrated into smartphones within the decade though. It's already mostly possible with the front-facing camera + light field of iphones, plus AR, plus motion sensor technology, plus the load of processing power they put in there.
  • meowface 5y ago
    Makes you wonder in what ways our contemporary sci-fi is going to look totally off-base in 50 years.
• sgeorge96 5y ago
  Can we reserve these types of names for spaceship projects please.
• jarek83 5y ago
  Great tech, shame it's google - whatever they do, they do it to sell you, not to you.
• russdpale 5y ago
  This is really cool, and I'm sure they didn't mean it, but it looks like they are in and ultra low security prison during visitations .
• janandonly 5y ago
  Give it a year or 2 and the iPad Pro will have this as a standard feature in Facetime. > Project Starline is currently available in just a few of our offices and it relies on custom-built hardware and highly specialized equipment. We believe this is where person-to-person communication technology can and should go, and in time, our goal is to make this technology more affordable and accessible, including bringing some of these technical advancements into our suite of communication products.
• alkonaut 5y ago
  I wonder how close you could come to this experience with some "standard" hardware like a standard 100-500mbit connection, a normal 4K TV and a Kinect. That is: given 10% of the cost, how many % of the experience could you deliver?
• jonplackett 5y ago
  I wonder what distance they tried this over - there's a hard limit on speed-of-light for latency between continents, plus whatever encoding/decoding has to happen, so seems like we're always going to have that slightly awkward taking-over-each-other issue?
• raxxorrax 5y ago
  In 2059 we probably will invent technology that allows you to talk to people without even having to see them. Jokes aside, it is cool tech, but I fail to see applications. With my developer colleagues we mostly share a desktop instead of seeing other peoples faces. Don't know how it is technically solved to simulate depth, but I image it being no different than conventional screens. The difficulty is probably doing a real time stereoscopy of the object displayed. Would be cool to know if they only use AI supported imaging for that, or if they have some sensors, maybe invisible laser projections or stuff like that. There are probably restrictions how the cameras must be angled too, so a self-made home setup would be difficult to calibrate.
  • czechdeveloper 5y ago
    This is for family and friend meetings, not for work calls. This is all made to evoke sense of closeness.
• a_imho 5y ago
  Even this carefully curated demo looks lackluster, but I'm probably not the target audience.
• illwrks 5y ago
  I have very little knowledge of this, but as a product would it not be much cheaper to have something like a wii bar fixed to the top and bottom of a screen, with a small camera at the extremities of each bar (one for each of the four corners)? You could then use the camera perspectives to create a 3d image of the person you're conversing with and map the colour data correctly to that 3d image (Photogrammetry) You could also likely use the information from the four cameras to map the orientation of the 3d image of the person you're speaking with to give you that sense of depth as you shift your position. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw If you had a speaker and mic in each corner you could also capture / emit subtle differences in audio to further enhance it.
• ksec 5y ago
  I used to say Google has never done anything really great other than their search engine. And generally speaking this opinions tends to get quite a lot of upvote ( as well as some unsuccessful counter arguments ). That is why when another Google project launch or failed. I wont be surprised. This is the first time, I felt this is going to be great. Something that should have came from Apple, the humane side of technology, for the first time ever came from Google. Hopefully this isn't a one off thing or an outliner from Google. Apple desperately need some competition.
  • mritchie712 5y ago
    It could also completely disappear due to lack of a compelling enough business model. We'll see!
  • abrahamepton 5y ago
    It’s a pretty silly argument. Maps, android, gmail, translate, docs, mapreduce, kubernetes, tensorflow come to mind off the top of my head. Honestly it’s a stupid contention. Apple’s awesome but the list of “great” things they’ve done is what, a third as long despite existing decades longer?
    • ksec 5y ago
      It was for consumer and user facing features / products. So technicals like MapReduce and K8s dont count. And I still have reservation about k8s. Map was probably one we had last time when it was discussed. Gmail came in as side project, unintended. Android was acquired and forced to react with iOS.
• gehsty 5y ago
  Super cool technology. It will be interesting to see how this develops, for me google seem to struggle with hardware products, even more with consumer hardware products. I can't see where it fits in to the google ecosystem and how people will access it. I could imagine Apple selling this in a re-imagined Apple TV with an Apple TV Facetime App. They could probably build something now with the FaceID sensor array / iPhone Camera system / M1 chip plugged into a 4k TV.
• sush1612 5y ago
  It is still behind the screen, instead of video stream what you see is a 3-d rendered model which moves in real time. wonder how it is different from a video call.
• dmux 5y ago
  Random thought, but do you "own" a 3d scanned representation of yourself?
• Mikho 5y ago
  Looks like another Magic Leap but in TV formfactor—technology great in concept, and even MVP but completely unrealistic in terms of consumer grade HW as to affordability and accessibility. It will be another tombstone on a huge grave of Google products. Just like Google Glass and many other. It's too hard to trust Google these days and its initiatives.
• aaroninsf 5y ago
  C.f. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/10/05/gan-video-conferencing-maxine/ https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/10/05/gan-video-conferenc... Our relationship to chat bots and assistants is going to get a lot more unsettling in a few years. Consider the difference in cognitive load and emotional burden between a human hitting you up in the Whole Foods parking lot to donate, and, the junk mail you deleted/recycled. We have no defenses against autonomic-level mirror neuron empathic response when the uncanny valley is bridged... Imagine the call center bot whose eyes flick to one side for a moment, that being the tell of when a call center human takes over to handle a corner case. OH LAWD ITS COMIN
• ashneo76 5y ago
  Another google "invention" to get locked into Google invention and for Google to mine.
• _theory_ 5y ago
  High security prison visits...for everyone!