[HN Gopher] Project Starline: Feel like you're there, together
___________________________________________________________________
Project Starline: Feel like you're there, together
Author : ra7
Score : 1260 points
Date : 2021-05-18 18:54 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.google)
| sush1612 wrote:
| 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.
| ashekara wrote:
| So cool. Anyone have more information about tonari
| (https://tonari.no/)? They were/are working on solving this "feel
| like you're there" problem.
| bschwindHN wrote:
| 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
| fchu wrote:
| 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
| a_imho wrote:
| Even this carefully curated demo looks lackluster, but I'm
| probably not the target audience.
| machello13 wrote:
| Reminds me of 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 wrote:
| Haha, thanks ... worth hanging on until the second half ...
| lurkerasdfh8 wrote:
| 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.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| 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.
| shannifin wrote:
| While it looks exciting, I'm also interested in the 3D display's
| eventual potential for movies and games...
| ricopags wrote:
| 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
| chewxy wrote:
| 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.
| dmux wrote:
| Random thought, but do you "own" a 3d scanned representation of
| yourself?
| achow wrote:
| If you watch the video of it:
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| rajacombinator wrote:
| So what's the even moneyline on Google projects like this? 9
| months?
| fab1an wrote:
| 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.
| draw_down wrote:
| Pretty cool! Seems about as real as a concept car, though.
| BlueYoshi wrote:
| 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.
| whymauri wrote:
| please don't get google glass'd
| nothingreallyma wrote:
| Amusingly the video doesn't load for me... chrome browser,
| YouTube video, etc... just sits and spins
| grogenaut wrote:
| youtube is having an outage
| domano wrote:
| Oh wow, totally reminds me of the Solarians in Asimovs "The Naked
| Sun"
|
| 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.
| fungiblecog wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The inexorable march of technology will continue, curmudgeon or
| not. There's no reason this approach won't scale to groups or
| larger areas.
| difosfor wrote:
| I'm really curious about the 3D video compression codec; besides
| this, imagine what that could mean for 3D VR streaming!
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| 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.
| janandonly wrote:
| 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.
| sgeorge96 wrote:
| Can we reserve these types of names for spaceship projects
| please.
| vbsteven wrote:
| 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!
| KETpXDDzR wrote:
| 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.
| crooked-v wrote:
| 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.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| I imagine it will be like Google Glass. Tons of hype with the
| initial announcement, sobering realization that it's too
| expensive for mass market adoption, and its eventual settling
| into a niche market.
|
| And its inevitable discontinuation.
| barbazoo wrote:
| And have they announced yet how they're planning to invade my
| privacy with this?
| goldenchrome wrote:
| Well, they'll have extensive 3D data about your body and your
| house.
| acdha wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.)
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| Looks like an electronic prison visit.
| edderly wrote:
| Bingo. Video conferencing meets the uncanny valley.
| spurgu wrote:
| I.e. ecstatic since you're generally not allowed to see people.
| eamon_cas wrote:
| Reminds me of 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.
| spurgu wrote:
| 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.
| nickkell wrote:
| That's just reminded me that phone booths were usually filled
| with advertisements for "escort services". I'm sure it wouldn't
| take long for this to come back in this brave new world
| paxys wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Remote job interviews.
| wraptile wrote:
| No way anyone cares about visual detail for job interviews.
| randomsearch wrote:
| Great idea.
|
| I'd first go with an Internet cafe style booth booking. Book an
| hour slot and get your coffee included.
|
| Setup cafes in major cities and I think people would use this -
| could imagine setting a meet with a friend in another country.
| Parents showing off their new babies. Etc.
| interestica wrote:
| I hate to say it but my first impression of this was that it
| looked like a visiting area for a prison. (Something about the
| bleak colour palette and minimalist display). But, I think that
| presents a similar long-distance use-case as the 'phone booth.'
| I wouldn't be surprised to see this as a pay-per-use option for
| prisoners/families. It's probably only a matter of time before
| the 'Echo Shows' capitalize on it.
| nmfisher wrote:
| That's exactly the thought I have. I have a feeling it would
| be truly bizarre to sit down and talk to my mum or dad
| through this.
| baby wrote:
| Better than what we have now
| rvnx wrote:
| Well at some point prisoners won't have the choice in
| practice, because for safety and convenience remote video
| call will become the norm. This is the same paradox as
| social networks; making people supposedly closer, but in
| reality making humans further and further away.
| [deleted]
| whymauri wrote:
| it would certainly sit comfortably in a black mirror episode,
| lol.
| sangnoir wrote:
| A fantastic twist would be a reveal showing that the other
| person (no longer) exists in the real world and is digital
| construct... or some forbidden knowledge is secretly
| interdicted and censored by big brother, body-snatching
| peoples avatars in real time.
| hyko wrote:
| Plot twist: the person behind the screen is actually sat
| there, _everything else_ turns out to be a hologram!
| [deleted]
| Vinnl wrote:
| Yeah I had the exact same impression. Still vastly preferable
| over a zoom call, but I expect I'd have to use it extensively
| before I can shed that association.
|
| This is assuming that this somehow _does_ allow me to
| interrupt someone 's sentence -- otherwise might as well do a
| zoom call.
| interestica wrote:
| I didn't realize the current state of prison phone systems in
| both the US and Canada...
|
| 2020 notes:
|
| >["Why are jail phone calls so expensive?"]
| (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-are-jail-phone-calls-so-
| exp...) OCTOBER 13, 2020
|
| > ["A mom's $6,000 phone bill in three months: The push to
| rein in Ontario's costly prison phone
| system"](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-
| activists-see...) JANUARY 30, 2020
|
| > [Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act]
| (https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-
| bill/6389) 03/25/2020
| [deleted]
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| > And most companies should be able to afford having one of
| these in the office.
|
| Most companies don't give decent webcams already, I doubt
| they'd consider paying thousands for such a system.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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.
| dgudkov wrote:
| This could bring fax machines back too. Draw something on a
| piece of paper, put it into the receptacle, and voila - it's
| instantly printed on the other side.
| ExtraE wrote:
| Or, I mean, live synced drawing tablets. Why paper? (Unless
| you like the feeling of writing on paper like me but I bet
| money they'll replicate that sooner rather than later).
| jspaetzel wrote:
| I'd pay something for this but I bet there's more of a business
| market.
| ByteWelder wrote:
| I doubt that very much. Consider these scenarios:
|
| 1. Call for free from home/couch with a regular camera in the
| privacy of my home.
|
| 2. Go to some location and pay a third party to do a less
| private call, and have a better visual experience.
|
| The most obvious choice would be number 1 in 99.9% of all
| cases. In theory, privacy can be increased by creating a sound-
| proofed environment for your call, but in practice, that would
| easily become very expensive.
| evrenesat wrote:
| I would like to see this as a franchised service for cafes
| and bars. It would be nice to be able to treat drinks and the
| 3d chat experience to a friend who lives in another country.
| And you know, some conversations are done better at a place
| other than family home.
| spurgu wrote:
| The main thing here is the radically improved UX (as
| advertised). With this kind of tech I might actually hook up
| with some remote friends with whom I currently just text (I
| don't really use video calls for anything other than work).
|
| Edit: And even 0.01% of the video call market would be quite
| large. Naturally this idea wouldn't work if something like
| 10% of all video calls were replaced with these booths, they
| would be fully booked for weeks forward. ;)
|
| Edit2: And we already know most people don't care that much
| about their privacy since they already use services like
| Google Meet and Zoom and whatnot.
| tiagod wrote:
| 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.
| drusepth wrote:
| 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__ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| 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.
| williesleg wrote:
| Why is it the white guys build it but aren't in the video using
| it? So sick of this bullshit.
| LeCow wrote:
| Google Glass flop.
|
| Calling it now.
| thomasfl wrote:
| 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.
| alkonaut wrote:
| 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?
| aaroninsf wrote:
| C.f. 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
| Simulacra wrote:
| That is really interesting but I can't shake the feeling of it
| being like visiting hours at the jail.
| tyingq wrote:
| 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 :)
| [deleted]
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Some fun backgrounds and filters will alleviate that feeling.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| 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.
| AppleCandy wrote:
| No, just needs some onlyfans optimization. Step aside VR,
| there's a new medium in town, revolutionary engagement if
| casters can pony up.
| sireat wrote:
| "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."
| jraph wrote:
| 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
| illwrks wrote:
| 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
|
| If you had a speaker and mic in each corner you could also
| capture / emit subtle differences in audio to further enhance it.
| Mikho wrote:
| 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.
| helen___keller wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's not just an 8K video call, it also has 3D depth.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| 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)?
| nynx wrote:
| I wonder if this uses a microlens display.
| hyko wrote:
| This is so cool. I'd buy it.
| notyourday wrote:
| Will be canceled within two years.
| doodpants wrote:
| Two years after general release; they need time to develop a
| dedicated user base to upset by its cancellation.
| notyourday wrote:
| True. No point in killing it before customers invest time and
| money into the product that Google was all in!
| Pxtl wrote:
| 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.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| Perhaps one drives the other. Availability of magical tech will
| drive adoption of best practices in all the areas you have
| mentioned.
|
| In India, ISPs already advertise low latency and high speeds
| for "PUBG Gaming". The market evolves to solve the needs of
| consumers. Advertising for low latency for gaming was unheard
| of in Indian ISP scene, just a few years ago.
|
| So having this tech, would induce customers to get better
| hardware, wiring, ISPs etc, and would induce ISPs to provide
| better service.
| noahl wrote:
| I mean to be fair Google has also tried very, very hard to
| improve home internet access for people, to the point of
| setting up their own ISP and running municipal fiber networks.
| That's a pretty big try, and I really wish it had taken off
| beyond the places where Google Fiber operates.
|
| (NB: I work at Google, but this comment has nothing to do with
| my work.)
| apexalpha wrote:
| When it really comes down to laying Fiber isn't a job
| requiring innovation, it require hard man hours to pull
| cables.
|
| In the end Google tried to innovate around the hard work by
| burying cables around 5cm deep or so in stead of a meter,
| which turned out to be short sighted.
| hundchenkatze wrote:
| I thought Google was mostly buying up dark fiber (I think
| that's the case in my city at least). Where did they run
| their own, and what was the impact of the shallow runs?
|
| edit: nvm, found it :)
| https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/16/18381466/google-fiber-
| lou...
| hyko wrote:
| _The poor you will always have with you_
| julienb_sea wrote:
| Both problems are worth effort and energy. It is worthwhile to
| push the envelope at the top because that technology, if it
| really works and can be developed in a more consumer friendly
| way, will eventually become vastly more accessible.
|
| Solving gigantic scale problems requires a completely different
| kind of innovation than what you can achieve by pushing the
| pinnacle of what's possible.
| miralize wrote:
| It also in its (albeit) small way could push ISPs to get
| their act together. Perhaps thats a bit naive to say but if
| this sort technology is available, this will help push the
| boat forward in terms of underlying infrastructure.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I mean Google also has Meet for regular videoconferencing
| that's available to normal humans for free, so it's not like
| they're ignoring the mainstream.
|
| The issues with connection stability and latency are very real,
| but I don't know if it's reasonable to expect Google to fix it;
| the issues there are probably more political than technical.
|
| edit: Also, I think they did mention using AI for noise
| cancellation while videoconferencing in the keynote today.
| topkeks wrote:
| I think Meet has had noise cancellation for a while now.
| mpalmer wrote:
| For what it's worth, Google used Meet internally for years
| before making it publicly available.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| lmm wrote:
| Google owns one of the major consumer operating systems
| (Android) and a lot of videoconferencing goes via Chrome.
| They could absolutely be doing things like offering better
| connection quality metrics - look at how everyone currently
| ends up using a random shady "speed test" site.
| blululu wrote:
| That exists now. If you Google search 'speed test' (on
| mobile at least) the first result is now a simple speed
| test provided by Google.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Doesn't for me... but either way, they could do far more
| than that.
|
| If I'm having connectivity issues to a person, I have no
| feedback as to what's wrong. If I'm having a connection
| issue talking to a person, I want to see my ping to their
| server, my ping to my router, my ping to my ISP, their
| ping to their router, their ISP, their server, how much
| packet loss... anything to help diagnose what's wrong.
|
| Instead, when somebody turns into a slideshow with a
| robot voice, with no idea what's causing the problem.
| lmm wrote:
| Not for me, either on android or desktop chrome.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I don't know why, it's been around for at least 5 years.
| Maybe you have a Chrome extension blocking it.
|
| Anyways, Google absolutely does provide that, as well as
| additional analysis/warnings in YouTube.
|
| So Google's doing exactly what you're asking for.
| notatoad wrote:
| Normal video chat at its best is just kind of shitty though, so
| people don't have a whole lot of motivation to put in a bunch
| of work to make it still shitty, but slightly less so.
|
| If I could get video chat that felt like real life, that'd be
| worth running some wires for.
| rubatuga wrote:
| Anybody here want to fork Mumble for a better UI and
| authentication experience?
| russdpale wrote:
| Convenience and necessity. If the apex tech is so wonderful
| that its convenience becomes necessity, then it will become
| those proverbial stones on the bottom.
| jaza wrote:
| 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.
| jarek83 wrote:
| Great tech, shame it's google - whatever they do, they do it to
| sell you, not to you.
| busymom0 wrote:
| 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/ima...
| Animats wrote:
| 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
| ksec wrote:
| 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.
| abrahamepton wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| It could also completely disappear due to lack of a compelling
| enough business model. We'll see!
| sammalloy wrote:
| The biggest selling point of this technology is its ability to
| reduce business travel and cut down on carbon emissions.
| bscphil wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| rdtwo wrote:
| Google is bringing back the phone both! In 3D pretty cool
| nprateem wrote:
| I wish they'd pump their money and brainpower into trying to
| reverse climate change instead of an incremental improvement to
| chat like this
| hirundo wrote:
| 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.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Does your dad think your grandfather's problematic behavior was
| funny?
| sneak wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Great story re: your grandfather. Thanks for sharing.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| 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.
| adhoc32 wrote:
| Yes, like VR this will be used extensively by the porn
| industry.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Ah yes, the people whose first thought is not how they can
| use this to commodify women's bodies are "prudes". Yes of
| course. Women: become literal prostitutes for the only fans
| corporation. You could be RICH! It's so fun! They have
| t-shirts! Remember how I said you could be RICH?!
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Not sure my comment will bring anything to change your
| opinion, you seem to be already a hardcore antiporn person,
| and I can't defend sex work either because yeah I know it's
| got a lot of seedy aspects to it; but no, they're not
| literal prostitutes, cam girls and OnlyFans models have the
| advantage that they can earn money without having to be in
| contact with other bodies and potential diseases they
| bring.
|
| I know some girls who are prostitutes. They seem normal
| enough. Maybe they're wearing a facade and have hidden
| PTSDs, I don't know, but if that's the case, I think you
| might want to extend your crusade against the military.
| goldenchrome wrote:
| How is this any different from me wasting my life working
| for FAANG? Why is commodifying my brain any better than
| commodifying my body?
| thepasswordis wrote:
| I don't know. You should ask some of the abuse victims
| coming out of the prostitution industry why they're so
| upset, and remind them that their job is basically the
| same as working at google.
| [deleted]
| goldenchrome wrote:
| OnlyFans is not prostitution. Cam girls have complete
| bodily autonomy.
| CyanBird wrote:
| > commodify women's bodies
|
| The fact that you instantly associate what OP mentioned to
| women specifically is quite disgusting, not going to lie
|
| FYI More people than just women suffer through that and
| taking the oxygen of such a discussion via weaponizing
| linguistics is just nasty and a horrible way to spend the
| opportunity cost of it
| [deleted]
| flowerlad wrote:
| Does Starline include haptic gloves?
| agumonkey wrote:
| maternal grandfather had trouble adjusting to tv too, he never
| stopped greeting female tv hosts on screen
| yakkityyak wrote:
| 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.
| ibrahimsow1 wrote:
| If this uses fully fledged lightfield[0] it might be able to.
|
| [0]
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2020/06/23/googl...
| alkonaut wrote:
| Why would you need lightfields to make a TV that shows a
| different projection if you change vantagepoint?
|
| The device knows where the viewer's eyes are in 3D, so can
| display an image of the other end, as viewed from that point
| (within some constraint).
| ExtraE wrote:
| Non-amp link:
| https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/23/googles-46-camera-light-
| fi...
| paxys wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Is there evidence of this? This is not what I would guess the
| greatest barrier is to virtual healthcare
| mNovak wrote:
| 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.
| nemonemo wrote:
| 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.
| asim wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If it got widely deployed onto infrastructure not owned by
| Google, real-world internet conditions would ruin it with
| latency and lag-spikes.
| sammalloy wrote:
| 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.
| kaonwarb wrote:
| 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.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Can't wait to see ads in 3d
| isaacimagine wrote:
| 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
| xwdv wrote:
| 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.
| joelkesler wrote:
| 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
| airstrike wrote:
| _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 wrote:
| 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...
| umanwizard wrote:
| > 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...
|
| I honestly can't believe this still sounds fun to anyone
| after a year of Zoom dystopia.
| ghaff wrote:
| The last year has shown pretty clearly that for presented
| content, video works pretty well. Heck, it maybe even works
| better along with live chat than in person. (And, to be
| honest, for big events I would often watch live streamed
| keynotes rather than crowding into a conference center with
| 5,000 of my closest friends anyway.)
|
| But everything else about virtual conferences has
| completely sucked and anyone running events is aggressively
| trying to get back to in-person. (With a hybrid component
| for presentations.)
| unethical_ban wrote:
| 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.
| sbr464 wrote:
| A seemingly obscure feature of meeting in person or
| visiting a vendor at their own offices, it offers a chance
| to peak behind the curtains, to feel social cues that are
| hard to explain/justify. There's a lot of bulls*t in the
| corporate/smb world.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, the last year has shown us that streaming videos with
| some side chat is the easy part. Heck, maybe it's even
| better than in-person a lot of the time. I can re-record
| stuff when I screw up and do some things I can't do in
| front of a room of 50-100 people.
|
| And it's even good that people who just go to sessions for
| the content will be able to do so--for a lot less money and
| effort. But I'm planning to go back to in-person
| conferences as soon as possible.
| ghaff wrote:
| Better videoconferencing hardware is not a solution to people
| wanting to get together socially and serendipitously at events.
| And, by the way, how many people are going to turn a room in
| their house into a work videocall room?
|
| Personally, I find that--for most people--the idea that working
| remote shoves a lot of cost onto employees vs. commuting
| probably off-base. (With some exceptions for people living in
| small city apartments near offices.) But installing a room-
| sized videoconferencing setup at home even for people with
| decent-sized houses is pretty silly.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > how many people are going to turn a room in their house
| into a work videocall room?
|
| Very few while it's $20k+. But I can imagine a lot of people
| would want one if the price was reasonable. I'm sure you
| still use the room for other things.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Who said anything about a room in your house? This will be
| for offices first.
| ghaff wrote:
| Sure. But given that this sort of thing has been discussed
| many times before it's hard to ignore the context of remote
| work.
| sigstoat wrote:
| > This, my friends, is how business travel becomes nearly
| irrelevant
|
| the business trips i've been on either involved the
| installation of equipment, or were an excuse for somebody with
| budget to burn it on travel and expensive food/alcohol. or
| both.
|
| i think plenty of business travel will survive just fine.
| nmca wrote:
| Entertainingly, the technology to real-time impersonate someone
| over zoom photorealistically is also rapidly approaching - the
| window of irrelevant travel might be small.
| Sargos wrote:
| I don't think this will actually be a real problem as you can
| just sign the call with your identity which renders deep
| fakes useless.
| ajliu wrote:
| > 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?
|
| This is already a thing?
|
| Facebook has Portal, Apple has iPad, Amazon has Echo, all of
| whom support Zoom and other video conferencing apps. The portal
| even has a moving camera to keep you centered if you're moving
| in frame, and the iPad does the same thing with an ultra-wide
| lens and some post-processing.
|
| As far as dedicated videoconferencing hardware is concerned,
| Starline seems pretty late to the game. Although, I'll admit
| the fancy 3D imaging features is pretty insane.
| hbosch wrote:
| Unfortunately, this stage of the Google product cycle is the
| hardest for me to start getting excited for. I hope for better,
| but I cannot resist the nagging feeling that this will 1) be
| very, very cool, 2) be sold to enterprise customers who are OK
| streaming business calls through Google's cloud, 3) suffer from
| having no support, 4) be renamed and reclaimed by another team
| inside Google, 5) sunset.
|
| Is "Starlink" going to be a Gmail or a Wave? Hard to say.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > how business travel becomes nearly irrelevant
|
| I hope not. Video chat can really never be the same thing as
| meeting people in person.
| dontwannabe wrote:
| True. Covid Pandemic has proven 2 things.
|
| 1. Work From Home works. 2. Business Travel is totally
| unnecessary and saves a lot of money.
|
| End of an era for Travel whores.
| alwayshumans wrote:
| From my experience business travel is as much about sharing an
| experience as it is the discussion or dissemination of
| information. That's a hard thing to replicate
| Bognar wrote:
| The real value of business travel is what you do with people
| outside of work hours.
| baud147258 wrote:
| and business kickbacks and shared drinks at the hotel bar
| mortenjorck wrote:
| Until technology can replicate the experience of staying out
| late, drunkenly chatting with coworkers in the back of a
| taxicab as you ride through Manhattan, then grabbing a
| midnight snack at a hole-in-the-wall diner someone
| recommended back at the office, business travel will have its
| place.
| agumonkey wrote:
| My theory is that physical proximity means danger or love to
| our animal brains .. and knowing it's tech will disengage
| your brain from feeling close and will change your emotions
| and engagement to the other person. Now something more
| natural than a LCD screen might make video calls a bit more
| lively and efficient.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Maybe for the set of people that don't mind gimmicks and
| facsimiles, but for those of us that don't want to even turn on
| video there is no way you're going to get me into an entire
| videoconferencing box!
|
| Nothing beats in-person. Nothing!
| ilaksh wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereoscopy
|
| Which type of autostereoscopy is it?
| riffic wrote:
| HP did this at least 15 years ago with their "Halo" conferencing
| systems:
|
| https://www.networkworld.com/article/2258553/inside-the-halo...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC4sNztp8dk
| LogicCowboy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > Eye-contact was non-existent.
|
| Potentially a solved problem, just fix it in post. :)
|
| 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.
| percentcer wrote:
| 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.
| mrfusion wrote:
| I'm confused what the 3d display screen is? I thought we didn't
| have technology like that without glasses?
| AdamTReineke wrote:
| 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
| jayd16 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| gmueckl wrote:
| I'm not sure I'm following. If this is based on a flat
| panel display, there must be a lens array in front of it.
| There is no other way to achieve this effect without
| requiring the users to wear glasses. The lens array can
| be covered by a protective flat glass pane without issue.
| stolsvik wrote:
| From this Wired story, link found in another post above
| https://www.wired.com/story/google-project-starline, there is
| this passage: Move to the side just a few inches and the
| illusion of volume disappears. Suddenly you're looking at a 2D
| version of your video chat partner again.
|
| This implies, AFAIK, that it either uses lenticular lenses
| (which is the tech 3D-cards typically use), or a parallax
| barrier (screen tech from 3DS). There are a thus sectors from
| the screen to the viewer, and you need to have your head placed
| so that your one eye sees one sector, and the other eye sees
| another. What the reporter describes is when both her eyes end
| up in the same sector, which immediately makes the result 2D.
| Note that there might be more than two sectors, so that you can
| move further sideways and get a realistic view, but each eye
| must all the time be in a different sector. It can also use
| head tracking to achieve such correction of your view wrt.
| movement of your head, since it evidently constructs a full 3D
| scene of you and the other side, it can render that from any
| angle.
| chis wrote:
| I think it's something like
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI__qNx8Gdk
|
| Track both eyes, and then project an image to each eye based on
| its image in the room. The part I don't really understand is
| how it's possible to target the image to each eye. Maybe we
| have displays now which are like the 3DS screen, but with
| variable focal locations?
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| If it's that, why does the camera see a gradually different
| image as it pans around?
|
| See: https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-
| prod/ori...
|
| Notice how the angle of her face changes as the camera moves:
| first you only see her left ear, at the end of the animation
| you only see her right ear.
| dieze wrote:
| Use a demo mode to disable eye tracking and follow your
| ARcore/Vive puck located camera ? Or just ask the guy to
| close his eyes and put googly eyes on your camera...
| Hakeemmidan wrote:
| 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)
| beefman wrote:
| Why does the copy on this page read like something out of
| dystopian novel?
| drumhead wrote:
| Nice promotion project, I wonder how long it'll last.
| pc2g4d wrote:
| Make an entire wall out of this, now you are virtually colocated.
| rmccue wrote:
| The capture and compression part might be related to this Google
| Research:
|
| https://augmentedperception.github.io/deepviewvideo/
|
| Interview about the SIGGRAPH paper here:
| https://blog.siggraph.org/2020/08/how-google-is-making-strea...
| helios_invictus wrote:
| Doesn't look like these people are in a prison visit center at
| all.
| andyxor wrote:
| 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
| asenna wrote:
| 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.
| lloeki wrote:
| I share the feeling.
|
| I started working fully remote two and half years ago. Company
| has a couple of meeting rooms fully set up with Zoom, which I
| and a few other remote people used to connect to with my laptop
| for standups together with the in-office people. That's not the
| case everywhere but quite classic.
|
| The company also had a dedicated TV+camera+24/7 Zoom meeting
| setup in the open space itself, so that remote people could
| connect to and say hi anytime. It was surprisingly nice.
|
| Then one day on a whim I got a wide-ish USB webcam plugged into
| my Xbox One+.
|
| The difference in perception is insane: instead of having this
| wall of people faces, like you're on several phone calls at
| once, I got a portalesque window between the office and my
| place. Instead of connecting _people_ , it connected _places_
| ++. But it only works if both sides are sharing a _space_
| instead of a selfie angle, and I think the way sound was picked
| up by a fixed element in the room played a lot as well.
|
| So I'm a bit partial about this Starline thing, as it seems to
| be a step forward in "definition" but also feels like a blown
| up selfie angle.
|
| + There's no Zoom app on Xbox (which is really a shame) so I
| used Edge, for which Zoom on the web is more limited and barks
| on webaudio (which works! Zoom just support only Chrome so I
| had to dial in on a phone). Also, Xbox+Kinect truly had the
| potential to be something amazing beyond games. I believe the
| marketing was botched alright but it was also way too early for
| the audience.
|
| ++ Which ends up connecting people on a deeper level. At some
| point I caught myself intuitively wanting to hand over physical
| objects through the TV.
| JonathanFly wrote:
| >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.
|
| I don't understand why this sort of persistant 'portal' isn't
| more popular. But 10 inch screen is so small! A 55 inch TV is
| what, $300? Put it portrait mode and that's a life size
| portrait. The feeling of presence when the person's head is the
| correct size is so strong! I know Facebook sells something for
| the TV but can it be left on all day like that?
|
| I want it feel like one half of living room is a shared space,
| at all times. Like the couch is split in half by a portal. Then
| it just cycles through a list of friends and family with the
| same setup to find someone else watching Netflix or whatever,
| and you can casually join them just like a real shared living
| space.
|
| I don't need 8k or 3D tv. Just a 55 or 65 inch TV on the wall
| at the end of the couch!
| alexgmcm wrote:
| Wouldn't it be really difficult to put a 55 inch TV in
| portrait mode?
|
| Although I think as I live in a city with small apartments,
| wall-mounting is much less common. I guess with a decent wall
| mount perhaps it is trivial to rotate it?
| baby wrote:
| I used the small version of fb portal with my parents for a
| while and it was great, but I wish it would have been bigger.
| I've been thinking about buying a larger portal, but I might
| want to wait for this starline thing (although I have a feeling
| it'll be very expensive).
| chaostheory wrote:
| If you don't mind Facebook invading your house, I find their
| Portal TV peripheral to be good since the screen size is much
| larger.
|
| https://portal.facebook.com/products/portal-tv/
|
| There's another portal model that's as big as a small mirror.
| faitswulff wrote:
| Did you consider Google Nest Hub for this use case? I've been
| thinking of doing the same thing but I'm not sure which to get.
| asenna wrote:
| Last I checked, Google Nest did not have a "Drop-in" feature
| like Echo where my parents can just drop-into the living room
| of the other house (no calling or ringing).
|
| The Echo device just makes a sound that someone is dropping-
| in and gives a 10 seconds heads-up (of course this only works
| if you enable the permission for family members. Else it's
| turned off by default).
| faitswulff wrote:
| Neat! I'm sold on that feature. Thanks.
| thegginthesky wrote:
| This is very very cool.
|
| I remember when I used to be in a long distance relationship
| with my now wife. We used to have the laptops on Skype for
| hours just to have each other's company, even if we were
| studying or doing something else. It was very unique at the
| time.
|
| I'm quite jealous cuz back then we didn't have Echo Show, it'd
| probably be used just like your parents use it.
| [deleted]
| pinko wrote:
| 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.
| fataliss wrote:
| Can't one facetime on an appleTV/macMini with a webcam? Or
| use an ipad Pro?
| asenna wrote:
| "Alexa, drop-in to Kenya" works amazingly well.
| [deleted]
| deadfire55 wrote:
| Facebook has a 15.6" version of this called Portal Plus. I
| can't speak to the quality/value of it.
| retreatguru wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It looks really nice, but I'd really like a larger one that
| supports drop-in. Being able to just show up without having
| to deal with an elderly relative trying to find a button to
| answer is really a killer feature.
| russdpale wrote:
| That is really, really awesome!! I'm so glad it worked out for
| them! Its nice when a comment restores some faith in humanity.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| rexreed wrote:
| 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?
| baby wrote:
| I thing things get bloated and bloated until there's a rewrite.
| This is what happened for the facebook app, and google maps is
| very close to that point. I've started using apple maps more
| and more and I like it. I'm semi joking when I say that I
| upgraded to the latest iphone just to use gmaps.
| Mangalor wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| NB: Apple Maps also has a dedicated Mac app.
| tempodox wrote:
| While that's true, GP's point still stands. You can use
| G-Maps on all platforms that have a browser, but you can't
| use A-Maps that way.
| [deleted]
| netik wrote:
| This technology is unreal, there is a deep-dive here:
|
| https://creativity.arch.tamu.edu/_common/FoVI3D_DeepDrive.pd...
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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.
| mrfusion wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jonas21 wrote:
| There's a bit more detail in this Wired article (though it's
| still quite vague):
|
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| ProAm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Do you pay for youtube?
| ProAm wrote:
| I don't publish content on YouTube, but YouTube is also not
| intimate communication with friends and family.
| hu3 wrote:
| I was surprised today when I opened Gmail and it displayed
| this: 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.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| > 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#zipp...
|
| Why would this be any different?
| ProAm wrote:
| 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.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| How can you prove they don't do that?
| crazygringo wrote:
| Does anyone have a clue how the light field display works?
|
| Someone suggested this is the 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 wrote:
| I was curious too and found this slide deck:
|
| 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/ima...
| curtisf wrote:
| 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/
|
| 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
|
| Diagram from Wikipedia article:
| 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
|
| 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
|
| 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 (link has a
| SIGGRAPH talk recorded which shows example results)
| breakingcups wrote:
| 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.
| d3ntb3ev1l wrote:
| The ads will be amazing
| billiam wrote:
| 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.
| jonplackett wrote:
| 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?
| dontwannabe wrote:
| How is this different from a high resolution screen?
| presentation wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Does it track eyes to change the perspective? Since the image
| is in 2d, i can not think of any other way?
| homedepotdave wrote:
| The porn industry is about to be reinvented
| llsf wrote:
| 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.
| oars wrote:
| This is a game changer. Much better than VR/AR.
| megous wrote:
| More like cam industry...
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| 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.
| LightG wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Inferior to VR for gaming or pron.
| craigc wrote:
| 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.
| varispeed wrote:
| 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.
| georgewfraser wrote:
| 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 [2]
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4934608/
| aerovistae wrote:
| 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.
| Jommi wrote:
| Literally some of the best modern short stories there is.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| I definitely got vibes of the "viewing" tech from Asimov's "The
| Naked Sun", always exciting to see sci-fi tech reach the real
| world.
| karlkloss wrote:
| Came here to say that. Asimov was one of the few SF authors
| that not only imagined advanced technology, but also could
| see what it would do to society.
| tomduncalf wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sangnoir wrote:
| To those who want to read a sample of the anthology, the
| complete titular short story ("Exhalation") can be read
| online for free:
| https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/
|
| It is 6552 words long.
| [deleted]
| tomduncalf wrote:
| 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.
| Jommi wrote:
| I'd love to do a Clubhouse room just chatting around his
| stories.
| shriphani wrote:
| 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!
| tomduncalf wrote:
| Awesome! Thanks very much.
| shriphani wrote:
| And of course I feel I have to mention Richard Burton
| himself who led possibly the most interesting life in his
| time:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton
| sizzle wrote:
| 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?
| sizzle wrote:
| Conversations*
| CyanBird wrote:
| 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...
| allenu wrote:
| 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.
| xnx wrote:
| 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.
| MetalGuru wrote:
| Advantageous even if you don't have a working prototype. See
| Microsoft vaporware
| sneak wrote:
| Zoom lag is an issue with Zoom, not the network generally. If
| you actually do wired, p2p on the same side of the same
| continent you can get rid of most of the lag. Current lag comes
| from services that aren't p2p and bad networks (e.g. wifi).
| Pxtl wrote:
| Yeah, I honestly hate how much Zoom has won because I've
| found it's the _worst_ for latency. I have a mumble server
| running on a pi that blows the doors off Zoom for audio-
| quality and latency but it 's unusable for casual groups
| because nobody wants to wear a headset and feedback destroys
| it.
| sneak wrote:
| > _Yeah, I honestly hate how much Zoom has won_
|
| Zoom has won in the sense that MySpace had won, or perhaps
| in the sense that Facebook has won.
|
| This too shall pass.
| Trollmann wrote:
| Mumble beats nearly all service's in latency and audio
| quality because these two things are the problems it's
| trying to solve. Did you ever play around with Teamspeak?
| It's a bit worse on the latency side but more mainstream
| friendly. Personally I run a mumble server as well because
| it solves our problems but TS may be worth looking into for
| you.
| jayd16 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dbbk wrote:
| If they wanted to capitalise on remote meetings, I assume they
| would have shown one in the demo video. Instead they focused on
| family members reconnecting.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| With the amount of data needed, one on one is probably
| easiest. We saw teams and zoom struggle to support more
| people in a call last year. It's also nice to have them be
| true to size. Mini people might be somewhat uncomfortable.
| apinstein wrote:
| 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/
| russdpale wrote:
| 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 .
| qmmmur wrote:
| 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.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This is for family and friend meetings, not for work calls.
|
| This is all made to evoke sense of closeness.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Such an unnecessarily pessimistic comment. How do you think
| tech becomes affordable? It has to start somewhere and then we
| go from there...
| OminousWeapons wrote:
| New tech typically debuts at a high price point only wealthy
| people can afford, then as it get commoditized it becomes more
| affordable. Wealthy early adopters willing to pay high prices
| for novelty or business applications are what enable the fast
| pace of innovation that we have become accustomed to.
| microtherion wrote:
| Think of it as "The future is already here -- it's just not
| very evenly distributed."
|
| Quite a bit of the technology used there seems destined to get
| more affordable as it's getting more widely adopted.
| noir_lord wrote:
| William Gibson quote I think.
|
| And yeah, insane prices at the start funds development for
| everyone else, I remember when the first 4K screens came out
| and they where exotic, now they are just normal.
|
| Same thing happened with phones and hell computers, I was the
| first kid I knew with a computer back in the 80s and we where
| not wealthy, that think cost more than my dad made in a week,
| an actual IBM PC was unattainable til I was I was 10.
|
| Now I have hilariously more powerful single board computers
| shoved in a drawer because I can't find the time to do
| anything with them.
| dpratt71 wrote:
| What is an example of important technology that did not start
| as something only available to the affluent/connected?
| bsanr2 wrote:
| Penicillin. But then, he wasn't trying to make money off of
| it.
|
| And basically anything Nintendo pushes as a console gimmick.
| It's not that the tech immediately goes from research to
| broadly accessible, but rather that they tend to take old
| tech that no one saw as having profitable consumer
| applications and find one for it. In that way, as far as
| consumers are concerned, it goes from unknown to widely-used
| without making a stopover in early-adapter purgatory.
| dpratt71 wrote:
| Penicillin, maybe? But I wonder how quickly it became
| readily available outside of the Western world.
|
| And I see that Nintendo has apparently sold an extremely
| impressive number of consoles (https://www.nintendolife.com
| /news/2019/11/nintendo_has_now_s...). But even if everyone
| only bought one console each, that's only about 10% of
| world population.
|
| This may be a little unfair, but I do wonder if there isn't
| a tendency to consider a technology to be widely available
| when it becomes available to you and the folks farther back
| in the line don't count or aren't relevant.
| bsanr2 wrote:
| To say that a single company's products being used by
| even a single digit percentage of the world population
| doesn't meet the requirements to ve considered "widely
| available" is a stretch.
|
| In any case, you said "important," not "widely
| available," and yes, Nintendo's products are hugely
| important. Many of today's technological advancements can
| be traced back to their proving that a given use case for
| a primitive version of a given technology was viable.
| dpratt71 wrote:
| Whether it's a single company (or product) or multiple is
| beside the point. If a technology is only available to
| (say) 1% of the population, I don't think that qualifies
| as being widely available.
|
| I will also note that my original comment was in response
| to someone who is "more interested in tech for the other
| 95%".
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Is this technology important though?
| varispeed wrote:
| A wheel
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Minecraft. Linux. (Really want to write GNU, but that's not
| true.)
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I think Minecraft and Linux are more like the content
| produced on top of the technology that is computers. It's
| like if a new book is written it's quickly available to
| everyone in the market who can afford a book. The book
| isn't really technology, but the printing, publishing, and
| distribution is and it's been around long enough to be
| distributed.
|
| Software seems less like technology and more like writing.
| The distribution cost, once the systems are in place, is
| marginal. The technology part is creating the systems that
| enable the software.
| munk-a wrote:
| IBM in the 90's strongly agrees with you - this software
| stuff is never going to be profitable and everything
| people pay for will always end up going through us!
|
| More seriously, I disagree about software being less
| important because there have been very real innovations
| for tooling accomplished in software alone. Email is a
| pretty classic example - but a more modern one might be
| Google Cardboard which can turn your smart phone into a
| rather underwhelming VR headset. There are plenty of
| hardware alternatives but the same basic functionality
| was accomplished on generalized hardware.
|
| Additionally, all this technology is only really possible
| due to other technology - we don't discount a new shiny
| computer just because it's just a dumb oddly shaped box
| if you can't supply it with electricity - but the costs
| to develop software are _generally_ lower than hardware
| so I think it 's fair to have a general notion that
| hardware is more innovative - it's just that you're
| conflating two different variables - cost and medium.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I think you're conflating technology with profitable or
| important. That is, you see me saying that software isn't
| technology and think I'm saying that software isn't
| profitable or important. That's not at all what I'm
| saying though. I likened software to writing. Writing can
| be important and it can be profitable, it's just not
| technology.
|
| Maybe we could agree on email as a technology. Maybe. I
| think it's a stretch. I hope we could both agree that the
| nth email client isn't technology though. It's not adding
| a new capability to humanity which is how I tend to think
| about technology. Refrigerator - keep stuff cold.
| Electricity - power to operate machines and light.
| Computers - organize, access, modify information. etc.
| New JavaScript library or new game... Not so much
| technology.
| munk-a wrote:
| I think that's fair yea - it might just be a matter of
| semantics. If you think software is included in
| technology then I stand by my point but, if your view of
| technology excludes software then you're quite correct.
| dpratt71 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!)
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Minecraft wasn't an important technology. It's a game built
| with important technologies.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Tell that to the mathematicians.
| munk-a wrote:
| I disagree - I would agree that Minecraft wasn't a novel
| technology, just like Linux wasn't a novel technology -
| it was an alternative version of Minix.
|
| Additionally Zoom isn't a novel technology, it isn't even
| particularly interesting technically when compared to
| other video conferencing solutions - but over the past
| year it's been incredibly important to a number of
| people.
|
| I think the OC slightly missed the mark in mentioning
| "important technologies" instead of something closer to
| "technologically innovative" technologies or, more
| accurately (but less interesting of a statement)
| "expensive to develop technologies". Things that are
| expensive to develop generally aren't cheap to begin
| with, while things that are cheap to develop need to be
| cheap to compete with other market entrants and clones.
| Additionally hardware (a limiting factor on cost for a
| lot of technology) tends to get cheaper over time and
| that rate of change is accelerated by a large market of
| interest (leading to more folks deciding to try and
| iterate new designs).
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > just like Linux wasn't a novel technology - it was an
| alternative version of Minix
|
| No, Linux differed from Minix in utterly fundamental ways
| outlined in the correspondence between Linus Torvalds and
| Andrew Tenenbaum.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I think they meant hardware. For software, yes there are
| tons of examples (open source software is usually free,
| games are usually cheap).
|
| But for hardware, it's almost always some expensive thing
| first. The internet was once very expensive to access, cell
| phones were initially very expensive, DVD players were
| initially very expensive, computers in general, etc.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Install these in neighborhood libraries, or as phone booths!
| notyourday wrote:
| Nah, if Google actually went for it for _years_ it would have
| went down the wealth requirement. The problem is that Google
| has demonstrated time and time again that it cannot do
| reiteration grind.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| I was travelling a few years ago. Even Russian bus ladies (they
| collect your fare) and Mongolians living in traditional huts in
| the middle of nowhere (and without any signal!) have
| smartphones now. I found the idea funny that the "To plug in a
| USB cable, you need 3 tries" experience was maybe universal.
|
| So, 12 years (back then) after the iPhone, it's reached a lot
| more than 5% of the world.
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| I would pay a lot of money if this was commercially available.
| Very impressive
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Makes you wonder in what ways our contemporary sci-fi is going
| to look totally off-base in 50 years.
| abhv wrote:
| 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...
| estaseuropano wrote:
| 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.
| patall wrote:
| Interesting. Does the light field work only for one person or
| multiple (they show mother and baby in the video)?
| sfifs wrote:
| 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 :-)
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| 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?
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
|
| 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.
| draw_down wrote:
| It does seem really cool but I don't see any reason to think
| they are sharing it with a larger audience.
| imiric wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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)
| Aeolun wrote:
| Using Oculus Quest 2 had me just walking around my room in
| wonder about seeing straight through the headset for a bit.
| crazygringo wrote:
| That's not true -- even with depth sensing cameras, it will
| still be full of artifacts, and things like curly hair or
| strands of hair will become disastrous because they're not
| easily geometrically modeled.
|
| The Oculus Quest 2 doesn't do anything like what you're
| describing -- it essentially just pipes in stereoscopic
| video from its stereo cameras and stitches them together in
| a trivial way. It doesn't attempt to build geometric
| representations of objects in your environment at all.
|
| (For guardian functionality it does very simple things like
| using the depth cloud to figure out the height of the
| floor, and if there are points inside the guardian that
| shouldn't be there, but that doesn't inferring object
| geometries.)
| supermatt wrote:
| if you look at the video you can see there are artifacts
| around the hair. It is likely applying some matting via
| AI to make it less obvious, but it is still there.
| panarky wrote:
| > _not that hard to do_
|
| Then it would be done already.
| imiric wrote:
| 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.
| rewq4321 wrote:
| 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/
| jlebar wrote:
| 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.
| anon_tor_12345 wrote:
| 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).
| jlebar wrote:
| Haha thanks. Not my pun, I just saw it somewhere on the
| internet!
| rewq4321 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It seems like it does, given in the demo video there's a
| lady and a baby in the same shot.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| 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.
| lultimouomo wrote:
| I suspect this worked because the person was, indeed, there.
|
| I mean, not in the same room, but down the hall or so.
|
| You can have the most perfect rendering in the world and
| 100ms of latency will be enough to make the experience
| miserable.
| closeparen wrote:
| You could imagine commercial/institutional sites hundreds
| to thousands of miles apart with <10ms latency on dedicated
| fiber.
| tomklein wrote:
| Wouldn't that be way faster than the speed of light?
| gearhart wrote:
| Depends how many thousands ;) light travels about 3000km
| in 10ms
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=speed+of+light+*+10ms
| soVeryTired wrote:
| That's in a vacuum, in a straight line. In fibre optic
| cable, light travels around two thirds of that speed.
| akie wrote:
| Depends on how much bandwidth it needs. I've been video
| conferencing a lot (who didn't, this past year) and even
| with people on the other side of the globe I don't recall
| latency ever being a problem.
| dash2 wrote:
| Also depends what you're doing. Singing together is
| impossible over standard video conferencing, for example.
| everyone wrote:
| yeah, like if your playing keys live for example, you
| want your audio interface to have around 6ms latency max
| (the delay time between your finger pressing a key and
| you hearing the sound from pressing that key) above that
| and it starts to become detrimental to your playing.
| above 10 and you can barely play.
| nipponese wrote:
| Isn't it just the "Pepper's Ghost" technique?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper%27s_ghost
| nimchimpsky wrote:
| huh ? how is it related to that in any way ?
| rewq4321 wrote:
| 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.h...
| soylentgraham wrote:
| Is it lenticular, or something else?
| jayd16 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Was this display developed by Google, or did they buy it from
| elsewhere? Is it still on the market?
| shard wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| IIRC those were displays that used sterescopy, while these
| simulate a light field instead.
| bullfightonmars wrote:
| 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.
| CountHackulus wrote:
| 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.
| codeecan wrote:
| https://electronics.sony.com/spatial-reality-
| display/p/elfsr...
| chewxy wrote:
| 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
| mhalle wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ipsum2 wrote:
| 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.
| signal11 wrote:
| I suspect eventually this will percolate down, somewhat
| like Facebook's Portal TV (PS149) but possibly also
| integrated with something like a Google Assistant/Siri type
| smart device to power the software and do other smart-home
| type things in your home.
|
| Many ordinary folk already have 4k TVs at home and 8k will
| probably become commonplace in the future. The real
| bottleneck will be good low-latency broadband both up and
| down, but fibre to the home should make that easier. I
| wonder if ISPs in the future will offer QoS guarantees to
| enable really good videoconferencing?
|
| I mean, Zoom, Meet et al are much better than video
| conferencing solutions like Webex even from a few years
| ago, but it's hilarious how much drama there still is
| around video calls. "oh, sorry, I didn't realise I had
| muted myself", "can you hear me...?", "I think we just lost
| Steve", and so on. I'll be glad to see all of that just go
| away.
| eps wrote:
| Facebook Telescreen(tm)
| kbenson wrote:
| To be followed up by Facebook Telepresence(tm) and then
| Facebook Omnipresence(tm)? ;)
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Mark Zuckerberg might announce that, but I think he'll go
| straight from Facebook Telescreen(tm) to Facebook
| Panopticon(tm).
| true_religion wrote:
| Max I'd pay would be $6,000 because I'd need to buy two:
| one for me, and one for my parents. If it were $3000, I'd
| have already bought it.
|
| $20,000 is a bit out of the reach of most people, and
| reserves this for business use or desperate need.
|
| I could see a bunch of execs getting this installed in
| their home offices as a company perk, and then using it for
| personal reasons too.
| ghaff wrote:
| A lot of execs don't have optimal setups with current
| tech. A lot of people just don't care.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| > reserves this for business use
|
| Even for business use a price with 5 digits would make it
| confined to a few executive offices.
| fnord77 wrote:
| probably built into smartphones in 10 years.
| cocoggu wrote:
| I think one of the major aspects of this technology is
| that the person you are talking with appears in its real
| size, with the same ratio than in real life. Something
| you cannot do with a smartphone, except if you are
| referring to a projector.
| bullfightonmars wrote:
| Well that wouldn't be a consumer product then. But I would
| pay as much as a high end tv. 2500? Maybe more? The
| experience looks to be transformative.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| 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.
| perttir wrote:
| Most internet providers here in Finland provides you
| fiber connections from 100-1000mbs pretty cheap. And
| 4g/5g connections from 100-300mbs for cheap prices too.
| Most of them does not have any data caps.
|
| I have 300/100mbs connection which costs 20 euros in
| month.
| cogman10 wrote:
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| That seems unlikely. My game stream in 1080p at 60fps
| already takes 40Mbps. So 4K at 30fps would need more like
| 80Mbps, and 8K 320Mbps
| fomine3 wrote:
| It heavily depends on what encoder and config you use. In
| my experience, 20Mbps (or less) HEVC by Turing NVEnc
| realtime encoder is enough for 1080 60p. Also halving
| frame rate won't halve bitrate because of how video
| compressed by reference frame. Also video meeting won't
| move pictures as much as FPS gaming.
| IshKebab wrote:
| 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]
| kbenson wrote:
| 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-mi...
| cogman10 wrote:
| HVEC is no longer king of the hill when it comes to
| compression efficiency. AV1 and the upcoming VVC do
| better.
|
| That said, my intuition is they aren't doing a pure video
| encoding solution. The fact that they talk about 3d
| modeling leads me to believe they are doing a combination
| of model + texture to get the realistic results. That
| would significantly decrease the amount of bandwidth and
| computational power needed. Over a low bandwidth
| situation you'd simply need to send model updates and do
| some smart interpolation to determine what things should
| look like.
|
| Similar to the concept that playing a 3d game requires MB
| of resources but recording the same game at 8k would
| require a boatload more memory.
|
| My assumption is they are using LIDAR to get a good
| model, high quality cameras to texture things, and a nice
| AI to stitch things together and interpolate when data
| isn't arriving fast enough.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| There have been great strides made in ai compression in
| recent years. I wonder if they are going to leverage
| that.
|
| https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/10/05/gan-video-
| conferenc...
|
| https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/02/lyra-new-very-low-
| bitrate-...
|
| https://aibots.my/officialBlog/deepminds-ai-agent-muzero-
| cou...
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I think this is what will be done in the future. You will
| interact with the camera for 15 minutes or so and it will
| create a custom compreasion algorithm for you.
| paxys wrote:
| I imagine it isn't (yet) because of the price tag.
| bostonvaulter2 wrote:
| And it would probably be very difficult to install at the
| moment as well.
| supermatt wrote:
| 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.
| Pxtl wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The "New 3DS" introduced head tracking and no longer needed
| your head in a fixed position by the way.
| somebodythere wrote:
| Sounds super cool. I can't wait for LFD tech to become more
| accessible to consumers.
| ortusdux wrote:
| 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
| bsanr2 wrote:
| 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
| mywacaday wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| probably would have an uncanny valley effect
| Valgrim wrote:
| It sounds like they are using this technology or something
| similar:
|
| https://lookingglassfactory.com/8k
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| hathawsh wrote:
| Does anyone know whether they're using that tech, something
| similar, or something else? I've always been interested in
| light field technology.
| tengbretson wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| No, that's what the lightfield does. You see different
| physical images depending on your angle to the screen
| defaultname wrote:
| 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.
| zaptrem wrote:
| I only know what I saw from the IO stream, but I think it
| might send a compressed 3D mesh + texture across the
| network and render the light field locally.
| dialogbox wrote:
| I think that is where the custom compression algorithm
| comes in. If you think the fact that human body and face
| doesn't change much, and the fact that it's a 3d model
| based, the compression ratio could be very high.
| hiharryhere wrote:
| Good point. Also the very neutral background would
| contribute to that.
| true_religion wrote:
| I bet they'd also just fix focus on the person and
| whatever they're holding, then blur out the background in
| most cases.
| dkarras wrote:
| I think what they are transferring is not a video but 3d
| model and the skin texture applied on the model (all
| derived from the realtime video / depth recording on the
| other side). The receiving and then renders it as a 3d
| model on the screen.
| eps wrote:
| Sounds like eye tracking could still be useful to not
| bother with images for angles that are 100% not visible
| at the moment.
| ithkuil wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23316225
|
| > the 8K is their Input Resolution. > That resolution is
| then divided into the 45 viewing directions:
| datameta wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Downvoted, with no response, for posing an open question.
| Shame on you, honestly.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| NO WAY.
|
| It is impossible for me to explain how/why it works so well.
| shahar2k wrote:
| I imagine they are using lightfield type displays like the
| ones made at this company -
| https://lookingglassfactory.com/
| ArtWomb wrote:
| It looks like it came out of the high-fidelity Immersive
| Light Field Video presented at SIGGRAPH 2020. Quite
| impressive that within a year it's now a consumer product
|
| https://augmentedperception.github.io/deepviewvideo/
|
| WebAssembly SIMD is coming to Chrome as well. 2D images and
| video that only consisted of RGB and Alpha channels may
| appear downright primitive to future generations as depth
| camera rigs gain distribution ;)
|
| https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6533147810332672
| sneak wrote:
| 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.
| JonathanFly wrote:
| >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.
|
| From my experience, 4k or 8k doesn't matter. Sound
| quality actually matters most, really clear low latency
| audio _alone_ will give you a surprisingly strong sense
| of presence.
|
| Video quality is important but 1080p is enough, beyond
| that the lighting and latency matter more.
|
| Equally important from my personal POV is video _size_ -
| physical size. Take a cheap 65 inch TV, turn it
| vertically, and talk to someone on that. When your
| talking to someone that is actually life size the sense
| of presence is vastly improved, even at the exact same
| video quality. And TVs are so cheap this doesn 't seem
| like much of a techical barrier.
|
| If you just screen share from your cell phone to your 65
| inch TV and video chat -- holding everything else equal
| for audio and video quality -- it's SO MUCH BETTER.
| imiric wrote:
| I think you might be underestimating the value of viewing
| a 3D model on a no-glasses 3D display. This is one of the
| basic aspects of in-person communication we take for
| granted that current 2D technology can't replicate. You
| can move your head and actually see a different angle of
| the person in front of you. This can even be subtle, our
| brain will still pick up the effect, and it makes the
| experience beyond what we usually consider as
| "immersive".
|
| Yes, having low latencies and high definition video is an
| important aspect of this, but the 3D part is no gimmick.
| Once the technology improves and gets affordable this is
| a game changer for how we communicate online. The step
| after that are holographic displays, and since we'd be
| used to 3D models and smart displays, it probably won't
| feel like such a big jump.
|
| I'm _super_ excited about this project. Hopefully Google
| doesn't axe it. (:
| birdman3131 wrote:
| Any benefit from the 3d seems like it would be vastly
| overshadowed by the massive artifacting in the hair
| though.
| adamauckland wrote:
| I thought that as well watching the video, but have you
| used a PSVR?
|
| I've got one and the first minute is always noticing how
| low res the eye screens are, then as soon as the game
| starts, I've forgotten and I'm _there_. The 3D part makes
| up for the low quality
| imiric wrote:
| C'mon, they're showcasing prototypes or early 1st gen
| products here. There is some artifacting, true, though
| not nearly as much as I expected. Kudos to them for
| choosing to show objects difficult to scan/model
| accurately and doing a pretty impressive job at it. Under
| ideal conditions to be sure, but still. It's certain this
| will improve with future advancements and probably will
| by the time general consumers get to use it. Unless it
| never gets a widespread release and ends up as another
| Google research project ala Google Glass, Project Ara,
| etc. Hopefully not, but if nothing else it would have
| served as inspiration for other companies to step in now
| that we know what's possible.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| And most people won't have wired gigabit and can't,
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| They will eventually. Hopefully the ISP monopolies are
| broken again.
| sneak wrote:
| A lot of residential areas in the US have gigabit
| options, in some cases symmetric. There are lots that
| have 1000mbps down/40mbps up cable.
|
| Even 100mbps is sufficient for a 1-on-1 4k video call, as
| high-bitrate 4k is 30-40mbps. Most commercial office
| buildings in business districts have it available. Even
| Starlink (20mbps up) should be sufficient for 1-1 30fps
| 4k videoconferencing with a lower bitrate.
| dboreham wrote:
| 40mbit != gigabit
| vbezhenar wrote:
| 50 megabits is enough for most scenes in 4K Blu-ray. 10
| megabits should be enough for 4K stream with good enough
| quality.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| I've spent a decent amount of time and money to make this
| happen and it helps less than you would hope.
|
| Partially there are just affordance issues of things like eye
| contact which are physically out of alignment unless you
| start using two way mirrors [1].
|
| https://hackaday.com/2020/05/29/two-way-mirror-improves-
| vide...
| peterthehacker wrote:
| Essentially eye-contact is the missing ingredient. I
| believe it! Eye contact is key to a conversation feeling
| authentic.
| isaacimagine wrote:
| There are technologies that can automatically adjust
| videos for eye contact today, so I imagine something
| similar could be implemented for this later on.
| porcc wrote:
| Eye tracking is the core feature here--the rendered
| "hologram" is correct from every possible angle. The things
| you mention are probably closer to 2% of the final result.
| plokiju wrote:
| Source on the eye tracking? The light field displays I've
| seen (https://lookingglassfactory.com/) don't need eye
| tracking to work
| akersten wrote:
| My intuition is that a great lighting+microphone+speaker
| setup is necessary, but not sufficient, for this demo.
|
| Even from viewing the short demo, the stereo display alone is
| an entirely new dimension that no amount of studio lighting
| will recreate. While better lighting and audio setup would
| certainly improve the average person's videoconferencing
| experience, this looks to be a genuine step beyond.
|
| That said, we've been seeing holographic-display prototypes
| for the better part of a decade, and it'll be interesting if
| this actually pans out or fizzles.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| What I think you're trying to describe already exists as a
| product from Cisco called "telepresence". It is/was insanely
| expensive, was a permanent installation that only Cisco
| contracted techs could install, and did what you describe: It
| is a series of large, curved HD displays with desks at an
| appropriate distance from the screens/cameras, and copious
| amounts of indirect lighting from behind the setup to make
| each party look good.
|
| It seems like the imaging/rendering technology that Google is
| using is much more advanced.
| ElliotH wrote:
| I've used such a Cisco system. Compared to regular video
| calls the latency and quality was light years ahead, much
| more natural conversations were possible. By which I mean
| it was possible to laugh, interject, and generally have a
| realistic conversation with a colleague in another country
| without having to compensate for video lag in that very
| careful way I find necessary on Meet and Zoom.
|
| That said, there was no "emotional connection" like the
| Google one is described as offering. It was still a video
| call. There was no forgetting that. I suspect the 3D and
| the apparent physical closeness to the display add a lot.
| noveltyaccount wrote:
| Wow I forgot about Telepresence. I used it a decade ago at
| a Fortune 500 company. With all of the cameras and displays
| perfectly positions, everyone was life-sized on video, felt
| like you were sitting around a roundtable. Now I'm
| imagining that with higher resolution and 3D light field
| display, wow.
| wpietri wrote:
| 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?
| Theodores wrote:
| The original 3G phone spectrum auction was in part premised
| on the notion that we would all be placing video calls.
|
| Personally I though VR glasses would take off when I had a go
| with them in the late 90's.
|
| Today with remote working I am on the end of a microphone
| without a picture of myself or my colleagues in the chat.
|
| Yet I am looking forward to being in the office.
|
| I see what Google are trying to do but we have wave after
| wave of this. VR is a classic, if only we can solve the
| motion sickness!
|
| On the family level those zoom calls with my niece are now
| plain telephone calls. Or WhatsApp messages. We stopped
| caring.
| swsieber wrote:
| I do. Ha ha. I really loved Dr. Strange in 3D. I'm sad 3D
| movies aren't really a thing anymore.
| wpietri wrote:
| Oh, I'd bet that team did a great job with 3D. (For those
| who didn't see it, it was a movie with great visual effects
| designed to blow the viewer's mind.) But you and that movie
| are the exceptions that prove the rule: for most people and
| for most movies, it just doesn't add much. The reason
| people go to see something on the stage is never
| stereoscopy!
| nickkell wrote:
| I honestly think it's amazing and I'm sure the novelty would
| wear off, but it would still be useful. One of the things
| that stood in the way of 3D viewing was dedicated hardware,
| which is the same issue here. Although the need to wear
| glasses is gone, you still need to buy some serious equipment
| for it. Maybe at some point this will be bundled into a
| normal TV setup and people will just take it for granted that
| it's there
| wpietri wrote:
| Anything's possible. But I want the people saying 3D
| TV/monitors failed because the glasses were just too
| burdensome to argue things out with the VR people who say
| that 3D is so amazing that the (much heavier!) facehugger
| units will take over the world.
| suyash wrote:
| Exactly, it's just a fancy FaceTime technology, I would be
| bored after few days. Tell me a problem that it solves.
| taejavu wrote:
| Eye contact
| golfer wrote:
| Tell me a problem Instagram solves. It's just a fancy
| Myspace.
|
| Tell me a problem WhatsApp solves. It's just a fancy SMS.
|
| Tell me a problem X solves. It's just a fancy Y.
|
| Etc etc
| wpietri wrote:
| If you talk to daily Instagram users, you'll find out
| what problem it solves. In particular, it was the lucky
| winner in the crowd of early photo-sharing-on-mobile
| apps. But the demand for that was proven by early photo
| sharing successes like Flickr. Realizing people would
| want to do that on their pocket camera device is not a
| big leap given what people were already doing to share
| photos from their mid-aughts cameraphones phones.
|
| There's no such plausible story for 3D video calls. It's
| not like people are already demanding 3D displays for any
| of their other 3D stuff. The 3D first-person shooter, for
| example, has been around for decades. But 3D displays
| have never been popular despite being available for at
| least a decade.
| varjag wrote:
| I (and probably everyone in immigrant communities) will
| get such a thing to my family and our parents as soon as
| we can afford it.
| wpietri wrote:
| That's an interesting hypothesis, but I'd need to see
| some data. Since you haven't experienced it, you would be
| buying based on hype, on the _concept_ of 3D. As I said,
| I 'm not arguing that the novelty is appealing. I'm
| saying that once people actually experience it and the
| novelty wears off, people stop caring.
|
| Another issue here is that this is being sold as like
| "being there", but it's more like "being there at a jail"
| where you can see person but can't get close to them,
| can't touch them, can't hand them anything. I have
| immigrant friends who do calls with their parents
| basically daily. They do it with mid-grade consumer tech,
| even though they could easily afford big screens and
| high-res cameras. That suggests to me that image size and
| video quality are not as important for this market as one
| might think at first blush.
| varjag wrote:
| You're not winning anything with casting Skype on TV,
| except messing with another remote for audio controls
| (which is in no way immersive or often not even high
| quality).
|
| And yes _OF COURSE_ I predicate buying on it actually
| delivering to the extent people describe it in the
| marketing video, it 's ridiculous I have spell it out.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Tell me a problem WhatsApp solves. It's just a fancy
| SMS.
|
| I gather it mostly solves that SMS is expensive in a lot
| of contexts. Personally I never use it because most of
| the people I text with have US phones. And the one person
| who doesn't, we use Facebook.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Yes? Other than not being hip, how _is_ Instagram better
| than Myspace? WhatsApp at least added features over SMS,
| although it sacrificed interoperability and went all-in
| on a closed system to get there. Newer is not always
| better.
| imiric wrote:
| > 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.
| serf wrote:
| > (e.g. electric cars were invented in the 19th century
| and are only now becoming popular)
|
| I hate this example, and it's like one of the most common
| ones on HN.
|
| As said by thousands of people and many documentaries
| before me , the electric car had numerous real
| conspiracies working against it, some of which were the
| most powerful financial groups in the world.[0]
|
| The 'electric car' wasn't made popular and possible by
| recent technological strides -- although it was made
| better.
|
| The success and popularity of the electric vehicle was
| made possible by financial shifts away from petroleum
| exploration, facilitated by dwindling profits and
| increased scarcity of oil, and encouraged by a movement
| towards sustainability both from the social culture of
| the world and the various actions of government from
| country to country.
|
| Yes, range has improved. Yes, the cars are more
| intelligent and better to drive -- but these improvements
| have been seen across the automotive industry since its'
| inception with ICE based vehicles included.
|
| The real motivating factor behind the electric car is the
| environment that now exists that allows such endeavors to
| be profitable -- an environment that not only includes
| technological improvements like you hint towards, but
| more importantly it's an environment that fosters
| development of such things due to the existence of a
| profit incentive and increased governmental-body
| cooperation.
|
| All that said, unless Cisco is even more evil than I
| realized (woah..), I have a hard time presuming that
| video conferencing has been held back by the same sort of
| conspiratorial under-handed back-office dealings that
| slowed the progress of EV adoption.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electri
| c_Car%3F
| imiric wrote:
| Why does it matter which circumstances allowed the
| electric car to become popular only now? Whether that's
| because of major industry and consumer shifts, or because
| the technology matured enough for mass market, they have
| the same effect. It's certainly a combination of both,
| and we shouldn't downplay the advances in battery
| technology alone.
|
| I mentioned that example because the previous two
| comments were dismissing this attempt at 3D
| teleconferencing on the grounds of it being old
| technology with past failures. But I think we agree that
| it takes a certain industry environment along with a
| technical leap to make a technology truly popular. Even
| if that never ends up happening in this case and it
| remains a niche product, we should applaud the technical
| merits here instead of being dismissive.
| ghaff wrote:
| >this attempt at 3D teleconferencing
|
| For that matter video teleconferencing period has only
| just really hit critical mass even though there were
| videophones at the NY World's Fair in the 1960s and
| camera systems have been around in conference rooms for a
| few decades.
|
| What really happened was that it became more or less
| accessible to anyone with a laptop and an even marginal
| network connection for basically no cost. And, oif
| course, the last 18 months really pushed it over the
| finish line if it wasn't already.
| wpietri wrote:
| Exactly. Video calls have become successful because
| remote work has become successful. The goal was not to
| make video calls. The goal was to further improve a team
| that was already remote. And I think you're right that
| the low/no cost hardware for most adopters has been key.
| Which I think is further proof that the demand is really
| pretty modest. I was just on a work meeting where half
| the people had their cameras off, and where I often
| didn't have the Zoom window on top because the video was
| very much secondary to what they were saying.
| wpietri wrote:
| > 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.
| imiric wrote:
| > When I want to see people in person, it's not because
| of a lack of stereoscopy.
|
| Of course, I'm not saying this will replace physical
| communication (I should've said "simulating" instead of
| "replicating"). But it's a clear step forward for
| traditional teleconferencing solutions. What do you think
| is the next leap from 2D video and displays? We're at the
| point of diminishing returns as far as increasing
| resolution goes, most consumers don't have a need for 8K
| or higher res displays. VR/AR is chugging along, but
| we're still a few generations away from mass market
| adoption.
|
| > I'd add that the telephone was not only a very
| successful technology for a century, audio calls still
| remain very popular.
|
| I don't understand. Video calls were never meant to
| replace audio calls, they just added a new sensory
| experience. It's perfectly fine for both technologies to
| co-exist for different moments and preferences. In a
| similar way this 3D approach is an extension to
| traditional 2D video conferencing if people have the
| equipment and prefer it. Judging by the expressions of
| the people in the demo and some of the comments here,
| you're underestimating how impactful this could be,
| especially if it's polished and cheap enough.
| wpietri wrote:
| It's not a clear step forward except in technical terms.
| Those often don't matter. For example, the big revolution
| in the last 20 years is not faster computers, it's mobile
| ones.
|
| I don't have much reason to think there is any near term
| "next leap from 2D video and displays". 2D renderings are
| more than 40,000 years old. They have improved
| drastically in resolution and fidelity. Computers added
| being dynamic and interactive to that. it's really not
| clear that 3D rendering adds much.
|
| > Judging by the expressions of the people in the demo
| and some of the comments here, you're underestimating how
| impactful this could be
|
| I am not, because that kind of novelty-driven excitement
| has driven _every_ wave of popular 3D rendering
| technology for 170 years. VR /AR has been close to mass
| market adoption for 25 years. We've just been through an
| unprecedented period of demand for at-home entertainment,
| and the hardware that many said was finally, _finally_
| the thing turns out once again not to matter.
|
| People have had those excited faces every time. There
| were people jazzed about the possible impact every time.
| The Brewster Stereoscope. The ViewMaster (with the US
| Defense Department purchasing 6 million reels on the
| theory it would revolutionize training). 3D movies in the
| 1950s. VR in the 1980s and 1990s. 3D movies again this
| century. 3D TV for 2 CESes. And then the latest wave of
| VR, which you agree is still not there despite fantastic
| investment from companies floating in cash.
|
| Could it be different this time? Maybe! But if we keep
| measuring it by novelty effects, we're setting ourselves
| up for the exact same failure that keeps happening.
| imiric wrote:
| > the big revolution in the last 20 years is not faster
| computers, it's mobile ones
|
| Surely the improvements in manufacturing processes,
| faster hardware and better screens are partly responsible
| for that. The iPhone as a concept has existed since the
| 1980s, and revolutionary ideas like what General Magic
| tried to produce in the 90s were just too early to be
| successful. When Apple tried it again in the late 00s it
| was a massive success, but technology finally reached a
| point when it was commercially feasible.
|
| So it doesn't take much to push a product to mass
| adoption. Just the right industry circumstances, a
| manufacturer willing to take the risk and capable
| hardware and software existing to make it happen.
|
| > We've just been through an unprecedented period of
| demand for at-home entertainment, and the hardware that
| many said was finally, finally the thing turns out once
| again not to matter.
|
| Are you dismissing the potential of VR/AR as well? The
| current innovation wave we're on is much bigger than
| whatever we had before. Headsets are becoming cheaper,
| more comfortable and accessible, and the visual tech we
| have now is leaps and bounds better than previous
| generations. Once we get to being able to put on
| sunglasses and experience different worlds, though likely
| sooner than that, the market adoption will likely go
| through the roof.
|
| > People have had those excited faces every time.
|
| I think it's different this time. It's not just it being
| 3D, but the merging of new generations of light field
| cameras, face/eye tracking, powerful ML algorithms, low
| latency networks and revolutionary displays is miles
| ahead of previous attempts. You can't just compare this
| to the ViewMaster and last century VR. The improvements
| here are much more substantial, and if they can make it
| cheap and reliable enough it could be a ground breaking
| product.
| wpietri wrote:
| Again, you're arguing that the technology might get
| better. I don't disagree. I'm not comparing the
| _technology_ of the ViewMaster. I 'm comparing the _lack
| of demonstrated demand /utility_ and the _pattern of
| hype_.
|
| Every one of the products I named was greeted at the time
| _exactly_ like you are now. The new technology was
| amazing! The potential was unlimited! And for the repeats
| like 3D movies and VR: It 's different _this_ time!
|
| I agree it _might_ be different this time. Nobody 's
| denying that. Aliens might land tomorrow. What I'm saying
| is that because of the clear pattern of "OMG novelty! OMG
| possibilty!" around 3D tech that has failed repeatedly
| for 170 years, you can't just uncritically make the same
| arguments. If you want to be persuasively realistic, you
| have to explain why the 3D novelty effect isn't the major
| driver this time. Because the long evidence is that 3D
| displays just don't matter enough for people to stick
| with them.
| rewq4321 wrote:
| "Hard tech" often only matures after _several_ hype
| cycles. Sometimes cool tech demos can be produced a
| century or more beforehand. If you were in the 1980s and
| people were talking about video calls being the next big
| thing, you might point out that people have been working
| on video calls since the 1930s[0], and it hasn 't caught
| on in every one of the hype cycles that have followed, so
| that's an indication that it won't catch on in the
| future. Video calls have caught on now though -
| especially as they've reached mobile devices instead of
| requiring a literal booth in your house, as with AT&T's
| initial "Picturephone" tech in the 70s.
|
| I will say though that people tend to assume that each
| new technology will _replace_ the preceding technology
| (text- >audio->video->VR/light-field->...), but in fact
| it tends to end up just supplementing the existing tech.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_videotelephony
| adamauckland wrote:
| Wow, this is a pretty ableist take. Deaf people or hard
| of hearing exist.
|
| I've got a hearing problem where I struggle to make out
| what people are saying on a phone but with a video call I
| can add lip-reading and visual cues which helps me keep
| on thread.
| wpietri wrote:
| Which is excellent, and I totally support that. But that
| doesn't change the market dynamics that I'm describing.
| We probably should live in a world where what drove the
| adoption of video calling was supporting the hard of
| hearing. But we don't, so it's not a relevant factor for
| the market analysis of what will drive the adoption of 3D
| video.
| Aeolun wrote:
| 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?
| speeder wrote:
| 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!
| graup wrote:
| Wait - I also don't have stereoscopic vision, do you have any
| details or sources for those magical glasses with prisms?
| sand500 wrote:
| Maybe this is a way to do so?
| https://www.eyebuydirect.com/prescription-lens/prism-
| glasses?
|
| Maybe it depends on the exact condition you have. Is it
| Binocular Vision Dysfunction?
| speeder wrote:
| I first learned about this prism business when I read this
| article:
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/06/19/stereo-sue
|
| Back then people even were saying it was pseudoscience or a
| scam, but seemly there is ongoing research that shows that
| the article wasn't lying.
| djrogers wrote:
| Sounds like a great reason to do a little medical tourism
| once the present situation is under control.
| JonathanFly wrote:
| >currently I don't have stereoscopic vision
|
| >my brain CAN do it, if I had the correct images sent to my
| eyes somehow.
|
| >when I watched Avatar, an actually well made 3D movie, it
| literally felt more real than reality
|
| Buy an Oculus Quest 2. (Or any VR headset, but that's the
| best value at the moment.) It sends seperate images to each
| eye. You should get that same 'more real than reality'
| feeling. It may even train your eye muscles to see in 3D, I
| know I've seen some research into that area.
| (https://www.seevividly.com/ comes up on a Google search,
| though it seems to be prescription only)
| karolist wrote:
| I'm someone with Amblyopia and would love to hear people's
| experiences using this. Seems like the project made some
| waves on reddit and kind of died down. I have bought Oculus
| Quest last year in anticipation of trying this but the
| pandemic and work pushed it out somewhat.
|
| Watching 3D movies in the theaters just gives me a headache
| but Oculus actually works fine, I've played a few games and
| it was amazing...
| gradschool wrote:
| I have that too. My right eye keeps steady while my left
| eye floats around at random (or at least that's how the
| linguistic side of my brain describes it). It would be
| great if a VR headset could track the left eye position
| and translate the image accordingly.
| ako wrote:
| Online eye exam: https://www.easee.online/en/
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Can you import glasses? Or, say, receive a box that someone
| accidentally dropped a pair of glasses into, along with the
| item you ordered?
| kikokikokiko wrote:
| Brazilian guy here: my girlfriend just bought two pairs of
| glasses from China, I don't know from which site exactly, but
| some AliExpress type of site. She paid 5 dollars each, just
| telling which degrees she needed for each eye. The quality
| was the same from the 200 dollars pair she bought with a
| medical note here in Brazil. Unbelievable. Just telling that,
| if you want it, you can import it through the mail and it
| will pass through customs without a problem.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| would be nice to share the site
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| If you search for "myopia glasses" on Aliexpress you'll
| find prescription glasses starting as low as $2. I just
| added a pair to my cart and the total was $3.31 including
| shipping. :O
| numpad0 wrote:
| Could be Zenni Optical. Prescription glasses, right as
| ordered, no questions asked.
| mkl wrote:
| I have glasses from Zenni. Very cheap, and well made. My
| current glasses cost ~10% of what the previous pair cost
| me in NZ, and the lenses are better quality. The glasses
| cost less than the optometrist visit, and I bought a
| second identical pair as a backup.
| Animats wrote:
| Not surprising.
|
| Something used in some countries is a briefcased-sized
| glasses making kit. Eyeglass lenses have three parameters -
| spherical radius, cylindrical radius, and axis of the
| cylindrical curvature. The trick is that for round lenses,
| you can use the same lens for all axis angles, which
| reduces the number of combinations to a set you can carry
| around. Once the right set of lenses has been decided, a
| notcher is used to cut a small notch on the side of the
| round lens so it locks into the frame and can't rotate.
| thegginthesky wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| thegginthesky wrote:
| Cool, thanks for explaining this for me!
| speeder wrote:
| The profession of optometry came from physics instead of
| medicine, many of the early ones with physicists
| specialized in optics that ALSO understood how the eye
| worked, optics-wise.
|
| In places where they are legal they spend their time
| learning more and more about optics, physics, math and eye
| anatomy, they don't study diseases, infections and so on.
|
| As result you can't rely on one to fix certain stuff where
| you do need a medic, but if you need fancy lenses, they
| will calculate them, not just use a number they get from
| their measurement machine like ophtalmologists do.
|
| They also would be helpful to design proper 3D glasses and
| whatnot, holograms and so on.
| thegginthesky wrote:
| Got it, I was a bit confused as I never had heard about
| the problem you mentioned. Too bad here in Brazil you
| can't get the specialized care you need for the condition
| you have.
|
| This is a major screw up and inefficiency from this
| country.
|
| Thanks for explaining the concept more in-depth too.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Similar tech in the display of the nintendo 3ds?
| jbverschoor wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| XnoiVeX wrote:
| Sony has it's own version of the light field display.
| https://youtu.be/KrLMnQM0_Ps
| leokennis wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Google will have definitely discontinued this project by then
| of course :)
| silentsea90 wrote:
| 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.
| leokennis wrote:
| 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?
| meibo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I thought Gmail "read" my emails to finetune ads but today
| it told me they don't: https://i.imgur.com/SHSOSJ7.png
| gregcoombe wrote:
| It's the office of the future!
| https://www.cs.unc.edu/Research/stc/. The challenge in 2000 was
| that bandwidth and 3d reconstruction needed several leaps forward
| in quality.
| wbsun wrote:
| Reminded me of this paper on SigGraph 2007:
| https://ict.usc.edu/pubs/An%20Interactive%20360%20Light%20Fi...,
| video: https://youtu.be/8gvPS1m40gw
| vicary wrote:
| That looks amazing
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| 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.
| gehsty wrote:
| 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.
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