Google’s Project Starline is redefining how we video-chat by using 3D capturing and holograms





Probably spurred by the way the pandemic absolutely upended social communications, Google unveiled Project Starline today at its I/O 2021 event – a one-of-a-kind teleconferencing system that ditches the camera and screen for something much more advanced. Dubbed as a ‘magic window’, Project Starline creates a lifelike hologram of the person you’re chatting with. Rather than interacting with a 2-dimensional representation of them, Starline makes it feel like you’re in a chatting booth with a real person sitting behind a sheet of glass… and it’s all thanks to incredibly complex 3D scanning, imaging, and AI recognition technology.

The video does a pretty standup job of explaining how Project Starline basically works. Instead of two parties staring at their phone screens, Starline’s video-booth allows people to interact with each other via rather futuristic holograms. It literally feels like having the opposite person right in front of you, and the 3D hologram can be viewed from multiple angles for that feeling of ‘true depth’.

The technology Google is currently using is far from anything found in regular consumer tech. According to WIRED, Project Starline’s video booth uses an entire slew of depth sensors to capture you and your movements (while an AI isolates you, the foreground, from the background). 3D video is then sent to a “light field display” that lets the viewer see a complete 3D hologram of the person they’re talking to. In a demo video, people using the tech describe how lifelike the experience is. It’s “as if she was right in front of me,” one person says.

Project Starline is still in an incredibly nascent stage. It uses highly specialized (and ridiculously expensive) equipment, and it hasn’t even been cleared for sale by the FCC yet, which means we’re potentially years away from being able to chat with 3D holograms of each other. There’s even the question of how our existing internet connections could support this dense and heavy image transfer – after all, you’re not video chatting, you’re 3D chatting. Notably, the tech also seems to work only with one-on-one chats (there’s a small snippet of a 3-person chat although the third person’s a baby) and group chats seem a bit like a stretch for now. However, if the demo is as real as the Google Duplex demo we saw a few years back (where an AI booked a reservation at a salon via phone call), Project Starline might have completely reinvented video chats. Can’t wait for a day when smartphones have this technology within them!

Designer: Google

Zoom is now ‘the Facebook of video apps’

Given our uncertain and nightmarish times, I’m going to cut right to it. A lot of us are wondering just how full of shit Zoom is. Because right now, at the terrifying end of one era and the beginning of another whose shape has yet to be known, this i...

What if Google’s services could revolutionize business conference calls?

Most people know Google to be an extremely popular customer-facing company, but a large part of Google’s empire lies in its enterprise solutions. From Google’s productivity tools to its business suite that unlocks the power of the drive, the email dashboard, calendar/organizer, all to streamline your business and your meetings, Google’s services play a very integral role in fostering collaboration, increasing productivity, and enriching businesses, both large and small… however, Google’s enterprise solutions have always been limited to just software.

The Google Us is a conceptual smart assistant designed to aid teleconferencing. Made to look like a part of Google’s existing smart hardware family, the Google Us is black, and shaped like a Home Mini, with a touchscreen. It runs a stripped down version of Android, and uses Google Hangouts to enable meetings and collaborative conversations by pairing with other smartphones and Us speakers running on the Hangouts platform. You can simply make group calls and conduct structured, timely meetings through the touchscreen interface on the device, much like a smartphone, but with a better focus on maintaining daily schedules and delivering crisp audio to both parties, thanks to Google’s efforts in audio engineering and far-field microphone technology. You can carry the Us speaker around with you, thanks to its in-built battery, and it even comes with a nifty wireless charger to juice it up!

Designers: Agustin Bernaudo & Alex Nys

The Google Us is a conceptual piece of work and is in no way affiliated with the Google brand.

Google is ready to take over your office chat with Hangouts

Google's work of transitioning Hangouts from being its default chat app to a more business focus is nearly complete. First up is the formally announced Hangouts Meet. Sound familiar? That's because it semi-officially arrived at the first of the month...

Logitech unveils First Anytime, Anywhere Portable Videoconferencing Solution


Logitech has announced today a new transformation in communication. The company has introduced a new conference camera. This new Logitech ConferenceCam Connect is basically a portable all in one...

Report: UK Spies intercept Webcams and Nudity


LONDON (AP) — Britain's signals intelligence division is stealing screenshots from hundreds of thousands of innocent Yahoo users' webcam videos, according to the Guardian newspaper, which also...

Mavericks Capable of Detecting Movement with Ambient Light Sensor


According to Apple Balla, an independent developer named Moshen Chen has discovered that Apple’s latest operating system is capable of sensing the existence of the user more effectively by applying...