2 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2021–2024
1:51 · 1.2M views · May 18, 2021
Google's short promo for Project Starline, a booth that shows a life-size, three-dimensional view of the person you are talking to. It presents the technology as a magic window for friends, families and co-workers who are far apart.
HN mostly uses it as a reference point for how much better video calls could get, with some skepticism about what the demo leaves out.
5 comments from Hacker News
We might just not know what we are missing. I used to think that video calls is a solved problem until I saw Google's Project Starline [0]. Video calls in AR could be vastly better, not just a little bit, but basically a completely different experience/relationship. [0] this video
I think the most promising Metaverse technology might be something like Starline [1]. No headset to wear. No disorientation. You just sit down and you're there with somebody else. [1] this video
If you watch the video of it: this video 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.
This is true of games, but not other applications. You need photorealism to have immersive video calls -- as if you are meeting in person. Here is a tech demo by Google; see how users respond to the realism: this video So we do need more immersive technology; just maybe not for games.
WFH vs No WFH vs Hybrid WFH has become the new emacs vs vi vs vscode (order not important), but I wonder if it will all go away when projects like this video become as available as a web browser